Your process for working through this is really clear, and I admire your willingness to change your mind after sinking tremendous time into the cause exploration. But I have to admit that I am puzzled that the cited evidence moved your beliefs that much.
Physical violence seems a priori like the most important factor in that list of harms, and is clearly negatively associated with child marriage.
Mixed/noisy evidence on other outcomes is certainly something to update on, but not with the strength that you have. Noisy evidence says more about the limitations of studies (sample size, respondents being sensitive because this is a frought issue) than about the absence of an effect.
You interpret the increased use of contraception as a positive outcome, but that looks like a negative outcome to me, because it seems like a proxy for having more (likely coercive) sex at a young age. It also seems like a second-order benefit compared to the first-order harms of coercion and violence.
More generally, we have to combine evidence with our prior beliefs, and we update less from evidence when our prior beliefs are stronger. In general I think we should have a strong prior belief that child marriage is bad—we are not totally clueless. So this doesn’t change my beliefs about child marriage very much.
Hi Karthik, thanks for engaging with my post. I think my post expresses two things:
a) the shock at finding evidence late into the project that had the potential to undermine other findings
b) my updated my position in light of new evidence.
I think I may have accidentally over-expressed a) to demonstrate the importance of looking for evidence that disagrees with positions early when researching topics. To clarify, my position now is definitely not that child marriage is not harmful.
My updated position is that the range of metrics across which child marriage is definitely and reliably harmful is narrowed. Unfortunately, with mixed and noisy results it is hard to know what is poor research design and what is lack of effect size. I still think that at the end of this project I will find that there is a good case that child marriage should be prevented, based on metrics I have not looked at yet, physical violence and the likelihood that girls will complete less school.
If I was trying to determine whether child marriage was harmful or not harmful, I would probably come back with a clear yes. But I have focused on exactly working out what exactly what harms are taking place because it has implications for the interventions that would be most effective, e.g. whether we focus on delaying the age of marriage to later teenage years because younger marriages are a lot worse or ending all marriages under 18 because all child marriages are equally harmful.
I take your point on the use of contraception, I do not know the rates of sexual activity in marriages or outside for these populations, but I would assume girls in marriages are having more sex, earlier.
I will further consider your view that perhaps I have not weighted my prior beliefs highly enough. I think I am hesitant about these views because I know that beliefs about when someone should get married and have children are very culturally determined, e.g. my grandmother got married at 19, which is shockingingly young to me, but was normal and what she wanted at the time.
This goes back to my take about how the problem here is actually LMIC governance, but it seems trivially true that child marriage is objectively very bad and also relatively bad compared to the opportunities that these girls should have, but it might also be true that it’s not so bad compared to the very limited opportunities they actually do have (albeit probably still negative). But the pathway to getting rid of child marriage seems clear: just improve governance & economic growth rates, and the problem will take care of itself as the economic returns to delaying marriage grow and grow. That seems much more tractable than some sort of mass cultural transformation.
Hi Sabs, thanks for engaging with the post. I would be interested to see the interventions available to improve governance and economic growth rates, and their cost effectiveness. The interventions to prevent child marriage are relatively cheap (like providing school supplies or conditional asset transfers) and have the benefit of immediately targeting the issue. They also help with economically uplifting families.
Your process for working through this is really clear, and I admire your willingness to change your mind after sinking tremendous time into the cause exploration. But I have to admit that I am puzzled that the cited evidence moved your beliefs that much.
Physical violence seems a priori like the most important factor in that list of harms, and is clearly negatively associated with child marriage.
Mixed/noisy evidence on other outcomes is certainly something to update on, but not with the strength that you have. Noisy evidence says more about the limitations of studies (sample size, respondents being sensitive because this is a frought issue) than about the absence of an effect.
You interpret the increased use of contraception as a positive outcome, but that looks like a negative outcome to me, because it seems like a proxy for having more (likely coercive) sex at a young age. It also seems like a second-order benefit compared to the first-order harms of coercion and violence.
More generally, we have to combine evidence with our prior beliefs, and we update less from evidence when our prior beliefs are stronger. In general I think we should have a strong prior belief that child marriage is bad—we are not totally clueless. So this doesn’t change my beliefs about child marriage very much.
Hi Karthik, thanks for engaging with my post. I think my post expresses two things:
a) the shock at finding evidence late into the project that had the potential to undermine other findings
b) my updated my position in light of new evidence.
I think I may have accidentally over-expressed a) to demonstrate the importance of looking for evidence that disagrees with positions early when researching topics. To clarify, my position now is definitely not that child marriage is not harmful.
My updated position is that the range of metrics across which child marriage is definitely and reliably harmful is narrowed. Unfortunately, with mixed and noisy results it is hard to know what is poor research design and what is lack of effect size. I still think that at the end of this project I will find that there is a good case that child marriage should be prevented, based on metrics I have not looked at yet, physical violence and the likelihood that girls will complete less school.
If I was trying to determine whether child marriage was harmful or not harmful, I would probably come back with a clear yes. But I have focused on exactly working out what exactly what harms are taking place because it has implications for the interventions that would be most effective, e.g. whether we focus on delaying the age of marriage to later teenage years because younger marriages are a lot worse or ending all marriages under 18 because all child marriages are equally harmful.
I take your point on the use of contraception, I do not know the rates of sexual activity in marriages or outside for these populations, but I would assume girls in marriages are having more sex, earlier.
I will further consider your view that perhaps I have not weighted my prior beliefs highly enough. I think I am hesitant about these views because I know that beliefs about when someone should get married and have children are very culturally determined, e.g. my grandmother got married at 19, which is shockingingly young to me, but was normal and what she wanted at the time.
This goes back to my take about how the problem here is actually LMIC governance, but it seems trivially true that child marriage is objectively very bad and also relatively bad compared to the opportunities that these girls should have, but it might also be true that it’s not so bad compared to the very limited opportunities they actually do have (albeit probably still negative). But the pathway to getting rid of child marriage seems clear: just improve governance & economic growth rates, and the problem will take care of itself as the economic returns to delaying marriage grow and grow. That seems much more tractable than some sort of mass cultural transformation.
Hi Sabs, thanks for engaging with the post. I would be interested to see the interventions available to improve governance and economic growth rates, and their cost effectiveness. The interventions to prevent child marriage are relatively cheap (like providing school supplies or conditional asset transfers) and have the benefit of immediately targeting the issue. They also help with economically uplifting families.