PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

This paper focuses on birth spacing, i.e. since marriage to first live birth in the rural areas of Bangladesh. The objective of this study was to examine the socio-economic factors which influenced the birth spacing among women since their marriage to their first live birth. The analysis was based on the primary data collected from women through a structured questionnaire. Different sociodemographic and economic factors which determined birth spacing had been identified in the analysis. A multivariate quantitative analysis was applied for this study. The findings indicated that both the socio-demographic and economic factors played, to some extent, a significant and important role in determining the birth spacing since marriage to first live birth. In particular, the women`s level of education played the most important role, and this was followed by the respondents` age at marriage, quality of care at the clinic, respondents` present age, mass media exposure, age gap between spouses, respondents` age at familiarity with contraceptives and family’s income. All these factors explained 13.5 percent of the variation in birth spacing since marriage to first live birth.