COUPLES FERTILITY PREFERENCES AND CONTRACEPTIVE USE

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Until recently family planning programs and fertility surveys focused on women. Since the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, there has been a growing interest in the role of males in family planning. However, family planning programs and research directed either toward men or women separately are less than optimal because it is known from previous research at selected sites that both husband's and wife's fertility desires affect the use of contraception and the probability of pregnancy. The proposed research goes a step further by using couple-based data from three continents to enhance our understanding of family planning and fertility intentions. The objective of this project is to analyze husbands' and wives' paired responses to questions on family planning and fertility preferences and each spouse's perceptions of her/his partner's attitudes using data from monogamous couples interviewed in 17 Demographic and Health Surveys in developing nations during the 1990s. Six surveys to be completed in 1998 will also be included. The major aims are to: a) conduct descriptive analyses of husbands' and wives' agreement or disagreement on current use of contraception, desires for more children, approval of family planning and spousal perceptions of these, b) define unmet need for family planning for couples and compare levels and determinants of married women's, men's and couple's unmet need, and c) determine the effects of husband and wife concordant/discordant responses to questions on fertility desires, and other couple characteristics on current contraceptive use. Determinants of agreement, correct perceptions, unmet need and contraceptive use will be assessed using traditional demographic and socio-economic covariates collected in these surveys and multinomial logistic regression techniques. Adjustments for clustering, selection effects and endogeneity will be made as indicated. For a wide variety of settings this study will provide the first international comparative examination of couples using standardized questions, interview procedures and statistical techniques.