Studies in Family Planning最新文献

Contraceptive counseling protocols tend to focus narrowly on pregnancy intentions, which may overlook other factors that contribute to whether an individual wants or needs contraception. In this report, we demonstrate the potential of two measures of individual contraceptive need that could be assessed as part of contraceptive counseling: (1) a composite score constructed from pregnancy intentions, sexual frequency, and perceived fecundity and (2) a direct measure of contraceptive need ("do you feel it is necessary for you to be using contraception right now?") We compare the two measures using data from Umoyo wa Thanzi, a cohort study in Central Malawi (N = 906; 2017-2018). More frequent sex, perceptions of being more fecund, and a stronger desire to avoid pregnancy were associated with directly reporting contraceptive need (p < 0.001). Women who directly reported contraceptive need had a higher average composite score than women who directly reported they had no need (mean = 7.4 vs. 6.3; p < 0.01), but nearly all participants had scores indicating some risk of unintended pregnancy. Contraceptive counseling protocols should consider assessing women's direct report of contraceptive need, along with risk factors for unintended pregnancy, such as sexual frequency, perceived fecundity, and desire to avoid pregnancy, to better counsel clients.

Unmet need for contraception is a widely used but frequently misunderstood indicator. Although calculated from measures of pregnancy intention and current contraceptive use, unmet need is commonly used as a proxy measure for (1) lack of access to contraception and (2) desire to use it. Using data from a survey in Burkina Faso, we examine the extent to which unmet need corresponds with and diverges from these two concepts, calculating sensitivity, specificity, and positive/negative predictive values. Among women assigned conventional unmet need, 67 percent report no desire to use contraception and 61 percent report access to a broad range of affordable contraceptives. Results show unmet need has low sensitivity and specificity in differentiating those who lack access and/or who desire to use a method from those who do not. These findings suggest that unmet need is of limited utility to inform family planning programs and may be leading stakeholders to overestimate the proportion of women in need of expanded family planning services. We conclude that more direct measures are feasible at the population level, rendering the proxy measure of unmet need unnecessary. Where access to and/or desire for contraception are the true outcomes of interest, more direct measures should be used.

Women's engagement in the decision to use contraception, an indicator captured in the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), is frequently used to assess women's reproductive agency. In 2014, DHS added a corollary question to the women's questionnaire on decision-making not to use contraception. Study authors hypothesize that women's engagement in decision-making not to use contraception is also indicative of reproductive agency. Analyzing DHS microdata from 30 countries collected between 2015 and 2020 (n = 292,141), this country-level study examines data quality in terms of missingness of data (t-tests), indicator utility in terms of response pattern variability (descriptive statistics), and construct validity in terms of associations between engagement in the decision not to use contraception and engagement in household decision-making (multivariable linear regression). Findings indicate the measure is of good quality, provides nuanced insight, and has construct validity. Importantly, the new measure deepens our understanding of women's reproductive agency.

Beliefs about contraception are commonly conceptualized as playing an important role in contraceptive decision-making. Interventions designed to address beliefs typically include counseling to dispel any "myths" or "misconceptions." These interventions currently show little evidence for impact in reducing beliefs. This commentary delves into the problems associated with using implicitly negative terminology to refer to contraceptive beliefs, which come laden with assumptions as to their validity. By conceptualizing women as getting it wrong or their beliefs as invalid, it sets the scene for dubious treatment of women's concerns and hampers the design of fruitful interventions to address them. To replace the multitude of terms used, we suggest using "belief" going forward to maintain value-free curiosity and remove any implicit assumptions about the origin or validity of a belief. We provide recommendations for measuring beliefs to help researchers understand the drivers and impacts of the belief they are measuring. Finally, we discuss implications for intervention design once different types of belief are better understood. We argue that tailored interventions by belief type would help address the root causes of beliefs and better meet women's broader contraceptive needs, such as the need for contraceptive autonomy and satisfaction.

Equating contraceptive use with programmatic success is fundamentally flawed in failing to account for whether individuals desire contraceptive use; this is problematic because nonuse can reflect empowered decision-making and use may reflect an individual's inability to refuse or discontinue a method. A rights-based approach demands respect for individuals' freedom to weigh options and choose how their desire for pregnancy prevention can be accommodated by available methods and within the context of their own personal, social, and material constraints. We offer an alternative construct, preference-aligned fertility management (PFM), that provides a more holistic indicator of whether one's contraceptive needs are met. PFM is more person-centered and informative for programming than status quo measures of unmet need, demand satisfied, and contraceptive use which define a positive outcome in relation to pregnancy risk rather than one's stated preferences. The PFM approach goes beyond other recent proposals for modifying the concept of unmet need by refraining from judgment of legitimate reasons for nonuse of contraception and offers a straightforward way to capture whether people act in line with their preferences. We conclude with discussion of how we plan to measure PFM in the Innovations for Choice and Autonomy (ICAN) study in Nigeria and Uganda.

While there is a large literature on the prevalence of unmet need for family planning, there is no matching quantitative evidence on the prevalence of unwanted family planning; all contraceptive use is assumed to represent a "met need." This lack of evidence raises concerns that some observed contraceptive use may be undesired and coercive. We provide estimates of unwanted family planning using Demographic and Health Survey data collected from 1,546,987 women in 56 low- and middle-income countries between 2011 and 2019. We estimate the prevalence of unwanted family planning, defined as the proportion of women who report wanting a child in the next nine months but who are using contraception. We find that 12.2 percent of women have an unmet need for family planning, while 2.1 percent have unwanted family planning, with estimated prevalence rates ranging from 0.4 percent in Gambia to 7.1 percent in Jordan. About half of unwanted family planning use can be attributed to condoms, withdrawal, and abstinence. Estimating the prevalence of unwanted family planning is difficult given current data collection efforts, which are not designed for this purpose. We recommend that future surveys probe the reasons for the use of family planning.

The concept of contraceptive method choice is complex and difficult to measure, usually requiring multiple metrics that represent the service environment, access, and acceptability. One of the most used measures for the family planning service delivery environment is method availability, or specifically, the contraceptive options that are available to clients at any given family planning service delivery point. Despite the importance of the measure, indicator definitions vary widely and are not standardized. We identified six versions of the method availability indicator and calculated each version using Service Provision Assessment data from three countries with varying family planning profiles, health service structures, and from different geographic areas: Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Haiti. We compared method availability estimates by urban/rural location, facility type, and across country context. Our results showed a wide variability in method availability estimates depending on the indicator used. Generally, indicators requiring a particular mix of method types had lower estimates of method availability than indicators only requiring a minimum number of methods. Results are discussed and recommendations are made to standardize indicator language and guidance. We further recommend the standardization of an indicator with a minimum mix of method types to ensure that a variety of method preferences can be met.

Family planning measures for unmarried women are based on contraceptive demand and use among sexually active women. Sexual activity status is commonly defined based on comparing reported time-since-last-sex to a cutoff time, with women defined to be sexually active if their most recent sex was within the last four weeks. While easy to understand and compute, this approach to constructing family planning measures results in a limited understanding of family planning and exposure to unintended pregnancy because it cannot comprehensively capture the frequency of sex at the population level. We propose a new statistical approach to quantify sexual activity, using reported time-since-last-sex data. Based on estimated frequencies of sex among users and nonusers in need of family planning, we propose new family planning measures, including the ratio of protected exposure over all women's exposure to risk of unintended pregnancy.

Research calls for the sexual and reproductive rights field to prioritize gender norms to ensure that women can act on their reproductive rights. However, there is a gap in accepted measures. We addressed this by including important theoretical components of gender norms: differentiating between descriptive and injunctive norms and adding a referent group. Our team originally developed and validated the G-NORM, a gender norms scale, in India. In this paper, we describe how we subsequently adapted and validated it in Nepal. We administered items to women of reproductive age, conducted exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, and examined associations between the subscales and reproductive health outcomes. Like the original G-NORM, our factor analyses showed that descriptive norms and injunctive norms comprise two distinct scales which fit the data well and had Cronbach alphas of 0.92 and 0.89. More equitable descriptive gender norms were associated with higher decision-making scores, increased odds of intending to use family planning, disagreeing that it is wrong to use family planning, and older ideal age at marriage. Injunctive gender norms were only associated with disagreeing that it is wrong to use family planning. Findings offer an improved measure of gender norms in Nepal and provide evidence that gender norms are critical for agency and reproductive health outcomes.

Fertility surveys have rarely asked people who are using contraception about the contraceptive method they would like to be using, implicitly assuming that those who are contracepting are using the method they want. In this commentary, we review evidence from a small but growing body of work that oftentimes indicates this assumption is untrue. Discordant contraceptive preferences and use are relatively common, and unsatisfied preferences are associated with higher rates of method discontinuation and subsequent pregnancy. We argue that there is opportunity to center autonomy and illuminate the need for and quality of services by building on this research and investing in the development of survey items that assess which method people would like to use, as well as their reasons for nonpreferred use. The widespread adoption of questions regarding method preferences could bring indicators of reproductive health services into closer alignment with the needs of the people they serve.