Page 37 - IJPS-3-2

Do young children prohibit mothers from working in Ethiopia?

specific evidence for the government of Ethiopia to support or not to support policy targeted at reducing fertility rate.
Formulation and implementation of sound national population and development policy and programs requires context-
relevant research evidence.
Therefore, the present study uses a household sample survey dataset from rural and urban married women with at least
two live children to document the effect of the number of children on work participation of Ethiopian women. It seeks to
bridge the gap by examining how effect of fertility on maternal work participation varies by the different lifecycles of the
household and by rural-urban location.

2 Data and methods

2.1 Data sources

Quantitative data regarding demographic, employment and other socioeconomic characteristics over the last four months
prior to the commencement of the survey were collected from a sample of 493 rural and urban married mothers with at
least two children living with the household, in two different time periods. First, a sample of 254 households were
interviewed in October 2010, and then with the view to increasing the earlier sample size, additional 239 sample
households residing in the same place as the previous sample were interviewed in 2013. The urban households were

randomly selected from four kebeles (the smallest unit in the administrative structure of the country) out of the total of
nine kebeles of the Bahir Dar City, the Amhara Regional State capital. Likewise, the rural sample households were
randomly selected from two kebeles drawn from two different rural districts.
While, as is evident from the abundance of published articles, research on the link between fertility and maternal labor
supply so far has typically been dominated by a quantitative approach, the use of qualitative approach to supplement and
rectify weaknesses of the former is conspicuously missing. There is now an increasing consensus among scholars that
the use of qualitative data within a quantitative one offers important value-adding advantages. Some of the value-adding
advantages include its ability in improving household survey design, interpreting counter-intuitive or surprising findings
from household surveys, explaining the reasons behind observed outcomes, probing motivations underlying observed
behavior, suggesting the direction of causality, assessing the validity of quantitative results, understanding conceptual
categories, and facilitating analysis of locally meaningful categories of social differentiation (Davis and Baulch, 2010;
Hulme, 2007; Kanbur and Shaffer, 2005; Lawson, Hulme and Muwonge, 2007; Shaffer, 2012). This article used
qualitative observation and interview conducted with survey households, with the view to discussing results from the
quantitative data analysis, and this was found especially helpful where results from the quantitative data alone were
found to be inconsistent with the theoretical expectation or with most previous evidence. An observation was made
where a member or members of a household were engaged in any type of work activity for the household.
In addition, government policy and program documents were used as data source. Specifically, the national population
policy document of Ethiopia and other policy and program documents related to population and development such as the
Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction Program (SDPRP), Plan of Action for Sustained Development to End
Poverty (PASDEP), Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP), and other relevant sectoral policies and programs were
reviewed.
With the view to assessing if the widely acknowledged rural-urban structural difference also translates into rural-urban
differentials in fertility and maternal economic outcomes, data were analyzed first using the full sample and then
separately for the urban and the rural sub-samples. As analytical framework, the paper also categorized the women by
their children’s average age groups to capture lifecycle variations in the effects.

2.2 Measurements

The objective of the present study is to investigate the effect of the number of children on the mother’s (participant’s)
work participation. The dependent variable is the mother’s participation in economic activities and the independent
variable of interest is the number of children. In addition, a number of other demographic and socio-economic variables
were also used as control variables, including average age of children, sex and age of the household head, participant’s
age at first marriage, participant’s years of schooling, contraceptive use (yes = 1; otherwise, 0), loan receipt (yes = 1;
otherwise, 0), members in the household other than parents engaged in productive or non-productive work, mean hours
of their work, and value of household assets in term of Ethiopian Birr (ETB). The choice of these variables is consistent
with most previous studies on the similar topic.

International Journal of Population Studies | 2017, Volume 3, Issue 2 31