Agreement and Concordance Regarding Fertility Intention and Family Planning Utilization Between Married Couples in Dukem Town,Oromia Special Zone.
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Date
2011-05
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Addis Abeba Universty
Abstract
Background
Traditionally, women have been the main respondents for the most of knowledge, attitude and practice survey related to family planning, contraceptive prevalence, demographic and health surveys and the like. The role of men has been limited especially in Africa where as men are the primary decision-makers of most reproductive issues including family planning. However, it has been now realized that programs that exclusively focus on either men or women may fail because most sexual, family planning, and child bearing decision are made or may potentially be able to be made by both partners together. Thus it is important to interview both husband and wives when ascertaining family planning attitudes and most other reproductive health research.
Objective
To assess the level of agreement and concordance regarding fertility intention and contraceptive use between married couples.
Methodology
A community based cross sectional survey was conducted on 422 married couple‟s in Dukem town which were selected by using systematic random sampling method. Both quantitative and qualitative method was employed. Data pertaining to fertility intentions and contraception was collected and the level of agreement (kappa statistics) between husbands and wives was computed.
Result
The observed concordance was 71.6% for ideal family size, 94.9% for contraceptive attitude, 95.9% for fertility desire, and 99.7% for report of number of currently living children. The unadjusted kappa statistic varied from a relatively low of 0.61(p<=0.000) for contraceptive attitude to high of 0.99(P<=0.000) for number of living children, for ideal family size 0.63(P<=0.000), fertility desire 0.91(P<=0.000), ever use of contraceptive 0.84(P<=0.000) and current use of contraceptive 0.87(P<=0.000) having kappa values in between. Overall greater degree of agreement was observed for reproductive health events as compared to family planning attitudes and intentions.
Conclusion
Overall, a greater degree of agreement was observed for reproductive health events as compared to family planning attitudes and intentions. The latter are more subjective outcomes and can be expected to vary among spouses. Thus, we can infer that for reproductive health events, wives responses can be taken as proxy for the couple‟s response but for family planning attitudes and intentions there is a need to collect information both from husbands and wives.
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Keywords
Agreement and Concordance Regarding Fertility Intention