Couples' Fertility Preferences in Kenya

Abstract

The objective of this study was to find out the extent of similarities and differences among couple fertility preferences and also to examine the effect of demographic, socio-economic and socio-cultural factors on these preferences. Very few studies have given couple studies the due attention; hence this was a slight deviation from the very common female studies. The study found out that as much as nearly half of the couples agreed on the desire for addition children and ideal family size, there seems to be an enormous amount of disagreement statistically. This was done using the Cohen kappa statistic. The level of agreement for desire for more children was only 37% while that for ideal family size was 22%. In all the situations a superior level of agreement was noted among couples who have similar characteristics such as the same age, the same level of education or the same duration of marriage. Results of multivariate analysis show that demographic, socio-economic and sociocultural factors fail to account for significant explanations of the variations in couple fertility preference. This may have been necessitated by the large amount of disagreement noted among the couples.