Title: Knowledge and viewpoint of adolescent girls regarding child marriage, its causes and
consequences
Version: 1 Date: 14 Jun 2021
Reviewer's report:
Thank you for the opportunity to review this research. The authors present descriptive findings
from a survey of knowledge and attitudes regarding child marriage among adolescent girls aged
14-18 residing in the city of Tabriz in Iran.
Background: I found the background section hard to follow. It makes many references to the
negative consequences of child marriage and little as to why adolescent girls’ knowledge and
attitudes towards child marriage are important to study. Also, it is not clear to me what the main
research question is, is it just describing the girls’ knowledge and viewpoints or is the main
research question to investigate the relationship between knowledge and attitude?
It would be nice to see more information on child marriage in the Iranian context in general.
For example, who are the girls more likely to marry as children (are they more likely to come
from poorer families, lower educated?), what role do girls play in the decision to marry as
children (is it mainly their own decision or their families?). It would also be helpful to see
some contextual information regarding Tabriz, where the research took place. The authors
include some information on the discussion, but I think it would benefit the reader to have this
information earlier on.
Methods: Before describing the inclusion and exclusion criteria, it would be good to know where
the data was drawn from, which is described later under sampling.
Can anything be said regarding the population (8-10 percent) who are not covered by the SIB
system (and are thus not represented in the study’s sample)?
Did the questionnaire include information on the girls’ schooling attainment? I would not
categorize “appropriate age of marriage for girls, the final person to make the decision regarding
a girl’s marriage, disagreement with parents if they decide to girls’ marriage under the age of
18 years old” as sociodemographic information. It would be good to know what the 11 items
regarding knowledge were (could be an appendix or supplementary information).
Why is knowledge the dependent variable and not attitude toward child marriage? I would expect
higher knowledge to lead to higher disapproval of child marriage, but not sure that disagreeing
with child marriage leads to higher knowledge. Also, why did the authors restrict the adjusted
model to variables with a p-value<0.05? It would be good to see results from a model that include
covariates based on theory and/or previous evidence rather than on a p-value cutoff point, as p-
values are affected by sample size. A problem with including covariates based on p-values is
that some explanatory variables that have real effects on the dependent variable may happen to
not be statistically significant, while irrelevant variables may be significant by chance.
Results: Table 1: Is there any information regarding the schooling of the adolescent girls in the
sample? I am not sure I understand Table 2. How were good, average, and poor knowledge
defined? Are the means referring to the mean knowledge score? If this is the case, why is the
mean for poor knowledge higher than the mean for average knowledge? And why are the means
and SDs the same in the upper and lower part of the table? Could the information in tables 3
and 4 be presented in graphs, ordered by % agree?