Estimating the completeness and timeliness of birth registration in Turkey with an emphasis on adolescent births

Faruk Keskin, Hacettepe University

An important component of the registration system is the birth statistics because the existence of a human being is first recognized by the government via the registration of birth and it plays an important role in the determination of completeness of vital registration systems. Studies for completeness of the birth registration system are lacking for Turkey especially after the establishment of Address Based Population Registration System (ABPRS) in 2007. In Turkey, only civil marriage is legal and the minimum age at marriage is 18. On the other hand religious marriage is very common in Turkey and adolescent marriages often arranged by religious marriage. In this context, this paper will investigate the completeness of the birth registration system in Turkey with an emphasis on adolescent births. The scope of this paper is to evaluate the data quality of the birth registration system with various methods using the Address Based Population Registration System (2009 – 2015) and Turkey Demographic and Health Survey (2008 – 2013) data sets in order to determine the quality of the registration data and completeness of the birth registration. The data acquired from TurkSTAT will allow an analysis of registration of births in different aspects. With the registration gap of every children ever registered starting from 2009, a trend of registration completeness can be observed for Turkey in general, for 81 provinces, with respect to mother’s usual place of residence and for the sex of the child. The teen pregnancy and adolescent marriage has decreased in Turkey for the last decade but the completeness and timeliness of the birth registration haven’t been revealed for the ABPRS. This research will mainly intend to fill this gap.