BUDS Challenge Mini Project — Analyzing Legal Age for Marriage
After completing the challenge course, we all were wondering what to do next. Then, We(Swati Sharma and Abhishek Bhattacharya) decided to work on Excel to analyze a standard data set under the Mini Project initiative of the Bertelsmann Udacity Data Science Challenge.
Next step was starting to figure out which data set to chose ? We finally landed on the Legal Age for Marriage Data Set by United Nations.
Sources Used:
(1) UN-data : http://data.un.org(2) https://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/indwm/June%202013/3a.xls (Data Set)
Why we chose this DataSet?
Choosing the Legal Age for Marriage Data Set was a decision involving the state of Child Marriage and Female Discrimination in remote parts of the world.Analyzing this data could give us more deeper reasons to why the things pan out that way.
Generally, children 16 and over may marry with parental consent, with the age of 18 being the minimum in all but two states to marry without parental consent.
We chose this data set to have an insight on the differences in the society between Male and Female regarding their age of marriage.This will give us the actual scenario regardless of the legal age prescribed by UN.
After figuring out the dataset we planned to use, We found out various results using Excel’s standard Visualisation Techniques. Results are as follows:
Men and Women’s marriage age without Parental Consent
Here, we drew a histogram between men and women (in case of without parental consent) and we can see the legal age for marriage in most of the countries is between 17.89 to 18.68 for men and between 17.89 to 18.68 for women.
Hence number of men getting married without parental consent is more than that of women.
Hence we can conclude that the number of men getting married without parental consent is more than of women.
“Almost 64% of countries throughout the world have legal age for marriage as 18yrs and only 3.3% of countries from all over the world have 20 yrs as legal age for men and women without parental consent.”
Men and Women’s marriage age with Parental Consent
Here, we drew a histogram between women and men (in case of with parental consent ) and we can see that legal age for marriage in most of the countries is between 15.71 to 16.81 for women and for men it is between 15.71–16.81.
Hence , the conclusion is that number of women getting married with parental consent is more than that of men.
From both , we can draw a conclusion that the age for marriage in case of parental consent is less than the age of marriage in case of without parental consent.
“Legal age for marriage with parental consent is 16 yrs in more than 50% of the countries throughout the globe. Only 5.5% of the countries throughout the globe have 18yrs as legal age for men and women to marry with parental consent.”
Men and Women’s marriage age without Parental Consent (yearly)
Here ,we drew a histogram between women and men (in case of without parental consent) with respect to year to see the pattern of legal age of marriage throughout the years .
We can conclude that the age limit increases between 2006 to 2012, although in 2013 again it gets to the normal age limit (around 18, for men and women both).
Men and Women’s marriage age with Parental Consent (yearly)
Here, we drew histogram between men and women (in case of with parental consent) with respect to year to see the pattern of legal age of marriage throughout the years.
We can conclude that the age limit get increased from 2005 to 2012, although during 2013 the age limit for women remain same but the age limit for men gets increased.
Social Impact
The most comprehensive study on marriage and age that sociologists cite was published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2001, from 1995 data, and it found that 48 percent of those who marry before 18 are likely to divorce within 10 years, compared with 24 percent of those who marry after age 25.
There are many countries involving very less data.We need to have more insights about socio-economic issues there and try to resolve them by analyzing the data collectively.
According to the analyzed data, Lebanon has emerged as the most affected country.Some Key Points below:
There is no minimum age of marriage in Lebanon. Instead, religious communities have personal status laws governing marriage, divorce and inheritance. Some of these personal status laws allow girls younger than 15 to marry.
There is little information about the scale of child marriage in Lebanon. Official data suggests that 6% of girls are married by age 18.
In February 2013, when around 200,000 Syrian refugees had arrived in Lebanon, a Child Protection Rapid Assessment revealed that child marriage was increasingly becoming an issue.
Destitute Syrian families decide to marry their daughters off in the hope that a man will be able to provide financial and physical support and protection for their daughters.
Future Aspects
From the Data Set, we can find that the age is mostly higher in case of parental consent which shows maturity in decision making regarding marriage.
We can also analyze the health and living conditions based on the marriage age by creating Experimental Surveys and have a new Data Set. Combining the both tables using Pivot Tables can give us more better insight to their Health and Livelihood.
Thanks to the Group Members ( and Student Leaders ) along with Udacity Community Managers for encouraging us throughout the course.
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