Why context matters for social norms interventions: The case of child marriage in Cameroon

ABSTRACT

Child marriage is a global health and human rights issue. In Cameroon, 30% of women are married before age 18 but little research exists on the drivers of child marriage in the country. This qualitative study contributes to understanding the role of social norms in sustaining child marriage in Far-North and East Cameroon. Participants in the study (N = 80) included women and men from four, ethnically different, rural communities (two in the Far-North, two in the East). Methods for data collection included 16 semi-structured focus groups, in which we investigated the system of social norms sustaining child marriage in these communities. We asked participants about typical age at marriage for girls (local practices) and whether they believed that age to be appropriate (their attitudes). We found the relation between practices and attitudes to be different in each community. We discuss the implications of these different relations for social norms interventions, enriching existing theoretical explanations. Evidence emerging from our findings suggest that effective social norms interventions should be embedded within cultural understandings of the relations between people’s attitudes and practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Social norms
• gender norms
• child marriage
• intervention
• Cameroon

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the women and men participating in this research, without whom we couldn’t have shared its findings. We also wish to acknowledge Damien Pereira, for his assistance in the management of interviewers’ training and data collection. Patti Petesch gave feedback on an earlier version of the focus group guide.

Availability of data and material

The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due to the agreement with the funding agency but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

The authors have published another paper from the same dataset, also on social norms and child marriage, but using different data in the set and for a different purpose (Cislaghi et al., 2019).

ORCID

Beniamino Cislaghi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6296-4644

Shakya Holly http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5320-9575

Additional information

Funding

The study was funded by UNICEF Cameroon. The funding body didn't play any role in the design of the study, in the collection, analysis, interpretation of data, and in the writing of the manuscript.