The relation between women’s status and demographic and health surveys: the case of Turkey

Ilknur Yuksel, Hacettepe University
Hande Tunckanat, Hacettepe University

The relationship between women’s status and demographic change has been on the demographic agenda increasingly in the last 20 years by the effects of international conferences such as International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo (1994) and Fourth Women’s Conference in Beijing. Most of the studies try to measure women’s status by using educational attainment and labour force participation of women and its effects on fertility transition. Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are the main surveys which try to measure women’s status by using different indicators. There are some additional indicators have been used for measuring the women’s status although it is criticized by some demographers. For instance, Mason (1993) mentioned the problems such as complexity of women’s status concept; measuring it in demographic surveys; incoherence of the designs of these surveys for expressing women’s status; and cross-sectional structure of these surveys. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the last three demographic and health survey in Turkey by focusing on challenges in women’s status and discussing the mentioned problems in literature with a critical perspective.