Page 40 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 6

CPS1484 Neela A Gulanikar et al.

Parametric bootstrap based test for detecting
changes in marriage patterns
Neela A Gulanikar, Akanksha S Kashikar
Department of Statistics Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, India

Abstract
Indian marriage markets have traditionally seen hypergamy, where females
tend to marry up. Recent increase in the female literacy rates and increase in
the female enrolment in higher education has resulted in some changes in the
educational hypergamy. We try to develop a parametric bootstrap based test
to examine the significance of changes in the marriage rates across different
educational levels. The test can further be extended to other socio-economical
groupings such as income groups, age groups etc. This will lead to better
understanding of changes in marriage markets which further affect the future
demographic structure of the country. Simulation studies are carried out to
examine whether the test maintains the level and the changes in the power of
the test for different parameter combinations.

Keywords
Educational hypergamy; Marriage markets; Parametric bootstrap

1. Introduction
Skewed sex ratio is an important problem in Indian context. Many parents
still consider female children to be burden and hence, female foeticide and
infanticide have been serious issues since long. At the time of independence,
the literacy rates in India, especially those in female population were seriously
low. However, the efforts by the government and different non-governmental
organization (NGOs) such as free school education / scholarships to female
children have resulted in the significant increase in the female literacy rates.
The Figure 1 shows that the proportion of literate female has more than
doubled over the last 35-40 years. Traditionally, hypergamy (marrying up) is a
common phenomenon in the Indian society. One of the major types of
hypergamy is the educational hypergamy, i.e., generally females tend to marry
men who have attained a comparatively higher degree. However, the recent
increase in the education levels in females are expected to have created some
disturbances in this educational hypergamy. Since the number of educated
females is on the rise, not all of them will be able to find a partner more
educated than them. As a result, some women may resort to hypogamy
(marrying down) and marry the men having lower education than them. As
per our knowledge, so far this change has not been statistically examined in

29 | I S I W S C 2 0 1 9