Thanks so much for this really thoughtful response!
I appreciate how carefully you’ve reviewed the data, and how open-mindedly you’re approaching this issue. I think your assessments largely seem reasonable, but we might diverge here:
My intuition from the outset of this project that child marriage would be intrinsically bad because it would expose children to unwanted sex and pregnancy. I have tried to leave that intuition to one side as much as possible because I know ideas about gender and adulthood/childhood are pretty culturally entangled.
I agree that ideas about gender and adulthood (and marriage, the value of tradition, etc) are informed by our cultures, personal experiences, political views, and so on. And when it’s possible to study an issue rigorously and reach meaningful results without relying on priors, we should do so. My worry here is that we’ve both identified challenges inherent to researching this issue (e.g., that many girls who are having non-consensual sex will not screen positive on existing surveys). Given this, I think it’d be a mistake to draw conclusions solely on the basis of existing data. In my view, we have many independent reasons to think child marriage is bad and not a lot of reasons to think it is good, and the data doesn’t move me much in this regard (i.e., I’m not being confronted with a lot of information that makes me think child marriage is good; it seems like most existing data suggests it is bad or unclear).
I’m also struck by the differences between Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, and Tanzania in the table you shared (e.g., 76% of girls in Ethiopia did not want to get married, and 75% of girls in Tanzania did!). This makes me think that child marriage might be a much more important cause in some places than in others, which would be consistent with other GHD initiatives, for which there is often substantial variation in cost-effectiveness for the same kind of program across contexts. Thank you again for all of your work on this!
I think you make a really good point that our priors should lead us to seek out missing data points to either confirm or dispute these priors. This is a really useful meta-conclusion for this project, thank you for highlighting it.
Yes the differences are striking, also a lot of the data I have looked at so far is in Sub-Saharan Africa, where there is already a lot of diversity in findings, but the legal and cultural landscape in South Asia is also completely different and I contains a lot of diversity also. As you say, I think this is more than a question of ITN for child marriage but ITN for child marriage in x place, knowing that the levels of harm, how common child marriage is, and how tractable it is are likely to vary greatly.
Thanks again for your engagement, it’s really helped my thinking!
Thanks so much for this really thoughtful response!
I appreciate how carefully you’ve reviewed the data, and how open-mindedly you’re approaching this issue. I think your assessments largely seem reasonable, but we might diverge here:
I agree that ideas about gender and adulthood (and marriage, the value of tradition, etc) are informed by our cultures, personal experiences, political views, and so on. And when it’s possible to study an issue rigorously and reach meaningful results without relying on priors, we should do so. My worry here is that we’ve both identified challenges inherent to researching this issue (e.g., that many girls who are having non-consensual sex will not screen positive on existing surveys). Given this, I think it’d be a mistake to draw conclusions solely on the basis of existing data. In my view, we have many independent reasons to think child marriage is bad and not a lot of reasons to think it is good, and the data doesn’t move me much in this regard (i.e., I’m not being confronted with a lot of information that makes me think child marriage is good; it seems like most existing data suggests it is bad or unclear).
I’m also struck by the differences between Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, and Tanzania in the table you shared (e.g., 76% of girls in Ethiopia did not want to get married, and 75% of girls in Tanzania did!). This makes me think that child marriage might be a much more important cause in some places than in others, which would be consistent with other GHD initiatives, for which there is often substantial variation in cost-effectiveness for the same kind of program across contexts. Thank you again for all of your work on this!
I think you make a really good point that our priors should lead us to seek out missing data points to either confirm or dispute these priors. This is a really useful meta-conclusion for this project, thank you for highlighting it.
Yes the differences are striking, also a lot of the data I have looked at so far is in Sub-Saharan Africa, where there is already a lot of diversity in findings, but the legal and cultural landscape in South Asia is also completely different and I contains a lot of diversity also. As you say, I think this is more than a question of ITN for child marriage but ITN for child marriage in x place, knowing that the levels of harm, how common child marriage is, and how tractable it is are likely to vary greatly.
Thanks again for your engagement, it’s really helped my thinking!