Social Marketing and Public Health: A Study on Family Planning in Bahir Dar Town
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Date
2010-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
When the population growth of a nation does not match with the socio-economic development, it
crates burden for the overall development, and reduce the countly's ability to improve the lives
of the citizens. Ethiopia is one of the country faces the problem of high population growth. The
population of Ethiopia increases nearly seven times Fom J J. 8 million at the beginning of the 20'"
century to about 80 million today. Therefore, attention of many researchers is shijied to the area
of fa mily planning (FP), which is considered to be as a means to have planned population
growth and sustainable overall development. With this background, the study is designed to
focus on the issue of FP Fom social marketing perspective in Bahir Dar town of Ethiopia. The
pwpose of the study is to analyze the knowledge, allitude and practices of FP in the region,
while identifying the factors affecting individual behavior of FP and contraceptive use.
Additionally, an assessment of the promotional activities used by social marketers to increase the
awareness and knowledge, and reducing the factors negatively affecting the behavior of
consumers to adopt FP methods was made. For the purpose, the town was divided into three
categories (inner, middle, and outer) based on the relative proximity (location) of kebeles Fom
the center of the town, and the kebeles for the study were selected by using simple random
sampling together with a sample of 400 households, contacted personally and responded on
distributed questionnaire. Moreover, three organizations working in the area of FP were
selected by judgmental sampling and in-depth interviews were carried out with them. Finally, the
results of the study indicate that there exist a significant relation between age, marital status,
and number of children with the user status/practice of contraceptive. Also, the respondents
obtain information about FP approaches through integrated marketing communication sources,
while majority of the respondents were found to be as regular and potential users, however,
there exist a significant difference between users and nonusers specific to the dimension of
knowledge and belief Furthermore, socio-economic beliefs, perceptions about service quality,
inconvenience, and lack of experience were identified as the{clctors affecting individual behavior
of FP usage, with awareness found to be positively associated with belief, affitude, and FP
practice. Moreover, individual perceptions and service quality were reported to be associated
with socio-economic beliefs, inconvenience, awareness and knowledge, and FP experience,
indicates that the usage of integrated marketing communication by social marketers creates
awareness about FP among the respondents.
Keywords: Social Marketing, Family Planning, Contraceptives, Beliefs, Altitudes, Ethiopia.
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Keywords
Social Marketing, Family Planning, Contraceptives, Beliefs, Altitudes, Ethiopia.