Survey research is often guided by the assumption that questions developed in one cultural setting are transferable to another. The Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), for example, asks standard questions about reproductive preferences that are used to estimate the amount of “unmet need” for family planning in a given setting. This paper uses panel data from the Navrongo Community Health and Family Planning Project (CHFP) in northern Ghana to assess the validity of the assumption that international preference questionnaires are relevant to Sahelian Africa. Trends in unmet need for family planning are estimated for a Sahelian setting where contraceptive use prevalence was low and post partum abstinence behavior prevalence was high prior to the CHFP. During the experiment, unmet need estimates remained constant at 30 percent over the 1996-1998 period, despite the fact that modern contraceptive use increased markedly. When unmet need calculations take postpartum abstinence into consideration, unmet need is only 10 percent, most of which is for spacing rather than fertility limitation. This demonstrates that estimates of unmet need in Africa require correction for the fact that couples space births with postpartum abstinence and other traditional reproductive control measures in the absence of family planning, and that modern contraception often substitutes for existing fertility regulation. This dynamic, which is not common in other regions, illustrates the pitfalls of applying survey methods in Africa that have been developed for other cultural settings. Implications of these findings for policy are reviewed and discussed.
Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of the session, the participant will have learned to: 1) Understand the need for caution when importing survey instruments to Africa without methodological research designed to evaluate and assess their appropriateness. 2) Recognize the pitfalls of unevaluated survey questionnaires
Keywords: Service Delivery, Family Planning
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: Navrongo Health Research Centre
I have a significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.
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