Appendix 3 Systematic Review of Child Marriage This review was commissioned by Dr Peter Tamas on behalf of RAU, and carried out by Kristal van Anrooif, both from the University of Wageningen, the Netherlands. This was supported by a NUFFIC grant from the Netherlands government. In order to answer the question “How are local’s constructions of child marriage researched?” a systematic literature review was done. A systematic methodology was used to structure the literature review (Gough, Oliver and Thomas.2012). According to Gough et al, there are main two types of reviews; namely, aggregative and configurative reviews. The synthesis of this study is on configuring data from the included studies to answer the review question and is therefore more a configurative as an aggregative review. The first step was to find search terms including inclusion and exclusion criteria. This was done by looking for articles on the theme in the literature. Terms used in these relevant articles, for instance their keywords, are used as search terms. The search term included child marriage, early marriage, juvenile marriage OR teen marriage, in combination with attitude, perception, construction, stakeholder, knowledge, local, belief, opinion, "social influence" OR value. Wildcards (*) were put behind these terms to also look for plurals. The inclusion and exclusion criteria for the screening of the titles/abstracts and articles were that the search terms should be incorporated and that the research is empirical. Old articles were not excluded since the aim of this study is to find out which methods are used to study child marriage instead of how child marriage is nowadays viewed. A search for articles in PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science was conducted with those search terms and selection criteria. Only articles which were available in online databases and written in English or Dutch were used. Useful references in those articles were also used for the analysis. All the titles and abstracts of the found articles were put in Atlas and the duplicates were removed. The articles were screened in a two-stage process. In the first stage, all the titles and abstracts were screened to decide if the articles are about empirical research and if the search terms are included. Of the articles which fit these criteria the full text version was retrieved. In the second stage, the full text articles were screened to decide if the research was empirical and the search terms were included. The articles which fit these criteria and the articles found from their references which also fit the criteria were placed in a new database for the in-depth analysis of the articles. Results 1437 articles, of which 775 were left over after removing the duplicates, were found with the search terms. These articles were screened in a two-stage process. In the first stage, all the titles and abstracts were screened to decide if the articles are about empirical research and if the search terms are included. Many articles were not useful and 23 abstracts have met those criteria from which the full texts articles were retrieved. Not all the articles were available in full text version or in English or Dutch (figure 1). 40