Spouses' socioeconomic characteristics and fertility differences in sub-Saharan Africa: Does spouse's education matter?

Although the general objective of this study is to examine the extent to wh ich spouses' socioeconomic characteristics determine whether modern contrac eption is used and whether family limitation (the demand for no more childr en) is desired, its central goal is to evaluate the degree to which the net effect of a woman's education on those fertility decisions is altered once a control is made for the level of schooling of the husband. Individual ch aracteristics of spouses included as controls in this analysis are on the o ne hand women's attributes relating to employment, age, parity, ethnic iden tity, and urban residence and, on the other hand, the occupation of the hus band. Data used in this research are provided by DHS surveys conducted in f ourteen sub-Saharan countries: Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon , Benin, Senegal, Ghana, Central African Republic, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Rwanda. With two dichotomous outcome variables, logistic regre ssion was used to estimate two nested models for each dependent variable an d for each country covered by the study. DHS respondents used as units of a nalysis in this study are women who were married (any kind of union) and no n-pregnant at the time when each national survey was conducted. The finding s suggest that, while an educated wife needs the support of an educated hus band to state a preference for family limitation in contemporary sub-Sahara n Africa, controlling for husband's education and other relevant covariates does little to undermine the evidence that woman's advanced education and the adoption of modern family planning are positively related in the develo ping world.