Studies in Family Planning最新文献

In sub-Saharan Africa, child out-fostering is a traditional social practice, and research suggests stable levels of out-fostering over time, yet the underlying demographic and socioeconomic factors driving this stability have remained largely unexplored. To gain insight into the prevalence and associations of child out-fostering and mothers' individual and household characteristics, we analyzed nine rounds of Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data of Senegalese mothers of children aged 0-14, collected between 1986 and 2019. Child out-fostering has remained stable, with nearly one-third of mothers of children aged 0-14 living apart from at least one child. Our findings indicate that at the macro-level, counteracting fertility and child mortality dynamics contribute to this stability. At the micro-level, out-fostering is influenced by a complex interplay of maternal demographic, socioeconomic, and household characteristics. The role of demographic macro-level factors demands further research attention in the context of persisting child fostering across sub-Saharan Africa. The results further suggest that changes, such as postponement of motherhood, as well as further declines in fertility and infant mortality, could affect fostering arrangements in the future.

Over the past six decades, significant demographic and familial changes, including rapid fertility decline, have occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), impacting household structure and formation. We document trends in and changes to household size and composition in the region, leveraging 144 country-year samples from census and survey microdata across 27 LAC countries. We measure changes in average household size, household composition by member relationship to the household head, and the evolution of female headship. Our findings show a general reduction in household size that mirrors the trend in fertility decline, albeit with subregional variations. An analysis of changes in members' relationships over time reveals that children are the main drivers of household shrinkage. The analysis also unveils the enduring complexity of household composition, namely of extended family structures. Female-headed households, which are characterized by more complex household structures than their male-headed counterparts, significantly increased over time. This trend partly explains the persistence of extended households in LAC. In addition, we document a gradual convergence in the average number of children per household between male- and female-headed households. These results challenge theories positing a global convergence towards nuclear family structures. Overall, LAC's demographic and familial transformations underscore the interplay between shrinking household size and persistent household complexity.

As educational access has expanded across Africa, birth timing has remained quite stable. Using data representing 51 birth years and 34 countries, we show that these modest aggregate changes mask more dramatic changes within educational groups. Over time, educational attainment has become an increasingly salient predictor of birth timing, as highly educated women have delayed first births and lengthened subsequent birth intervals more. The educational differentiation of birth timing also varies across contextual factors (educational access and family planning effort). In recent cohorts, women of all educational levels have experienced earlier first births in higher education contexts, suggesting that entry into motherhood is influenced by relative position within one's peer group. Aggregating across educational levels, however, women experience later first births in higher education contexts, driven by the greater share of highly educated women. For women at all levels of educational attainment, first birth timing is responsive to family planning context; in aggregate, women in countries with high family planning investments become mothers one year later than those in countries with lower family planning efforts. Notably, highly educated women lengthen their second birth intervals more when education and family planning are widely available, suggesting further potential for public investments to enable women to achieve their reproductive preferences.

Estimates of unwanted family planning (UFP), which are based on a desire to have a child in the next nine months among current contraceptive users, exclude women who are sterilized since these women are not asked about their fertility preferences; all sterilized women are assumed to have a "met need" for family planning. However, the India National Family Health Survey asks sterilized women if they regret being sterilized and whether they were told that the operation would result in their permanent inability to have children. We extend the concept of UFP by classifying sterilized women who express regret or who were not informed about the procedure's permanence, as having UFP. When limiting our analysis of UFP to nonsterilized contraceptive users, we find that 0.9 percent of Indian women had UFP in 2019-2021. In this period, 29.9 percent of Indian women were sterilized. We estimate that 4.9 percent of sterilized women express regret and 16.3 percent were not told of the procedure's permanence. Adding sterilized women who express regret raises our UFP estimate in India to 2.3 percent, while also including sterilized women who were not told about the procedure's permanence yields an overall UFP estimate of 6.9 percent in India.

Family planning researchers have been studying the discontinuation of contraception-the prevalence and reasons for it-for decades, as it has implications for contraceptive prevalence, total fertility, and unintended fertility. However little is known about the reliability of contraceptive discontinuation reporting: only two studies have examined the reliability of reported discontinuation in low-resource contexts. We use longitudinal and overlapping data from reproductive calendars to test the reliability of women's reporting of contraceptive discontinuation in Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Uganda. We test whether recent discontinuations reported at baseline are reported one year later, and if the same reason for discontinuation is reported. Results reveal moderate reliability at the aggregate level of reporting of the index discontinuation; however, reliability is low when the timing of discontinuation is considered. There is variability across the reliability of reasons for discontinuation; discontinuation due to desired pregnancy is reported reliably while other reasons are less reliably reported. Our findings have important implications for the field, particularly in how the data are used and interpreted; we urge caution around event-level analyses of contraceptive discontinuation and reasons for discontinuation, given low reliability.

Globally, care experiences of the growing population of contraceptive users are not well-understood. We leverage a large client dataset (n = 71,602) from three countries (Burkina Faso, Pakistan, and Tanzania) to characterize contraceptive services sought (visit objective and method preference), assess whether these visit objectives were met and for whom, and explore if visit objective fulfillment was associated with care quality. Most people in all three countries said they were seeking to continue their current method or adopt a method for the first time. Clients seeking to change their method were least likely to have their objective met: 63.7 percent of clients in Burkina Faso, 73.3 percent in Pakistan, and 61.1 percent in Tanzania who wanted to switch actually achieved this during the visit. In Burkina Faso, people with lower socioeconomic standing, lower educational attainment, and lower parity less commonly had their switching objective, fulfilled. Method preference fulfillment was generally high, although approximately 15 percent of Tanzanian clients were given implants despite wanting another method. Among those seeking to adopt or restart a method in Pakistan and Tanzania, having this visit objective fulfilled, was correlated with better perceived treatment and higher person-centeredness of care.