Quality, Accessibility, and Contraceptive Use in Rural Tanzania

We examine how informants' reports on community perceptions of the quality and accessibility of family planning facilities relate to the use of modern contraceptives by individuals in rural Tanzania. Using information on individual-level contraceptive use in conjunction with community-level inf...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Demography 1999-02, Vol.36 (1), p.23-40
Main Authors: Mroz, Thomas A., Bollen, Kenneth A., Speizer, Ilene S., Mancini, Dominic J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Access
Adolescent
Adult
Attitude to Health
Availability
Birth Control
Coefficients
Communities
Community
Community Services
Contraception Behavior - psychology
Contraception Behavior - statistics & numerical data
Contraceptives
Demographics
Demography
Factor Analysis, Statistical
Factors
Family Planning
Family planning services
Family Planning Services - standards
Female
Fertility
Health Care Utilization
Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice
Health Services Accessibility - standards
Humans
Impact analysis
Instrumental variables
Intervention Programs and Effects on Reproductive Behavior
Male
Middle Aged
Null hypothesis
Perceptions
Quality
Quality of Health Care
Regression Analysis
Rural Areas
Rural Health Services - standards
Standard error
Studies
Surveys and Questionnaires
Tanzania
Use
Women
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We examine how informants' reports on community perceptions of the quality and accessibility of family planning facilities relate to the use of modern contraceptives by individuals in rural Tanzania. Using information on individual-level contraceptive use in conjunction with community-level information on the accessibility and quality of family planning facilities, we employ two distinct statistical procedures to illustrate the impacts of accessibility and quality on contraceptive use. Both procedures treat the community-level variables as imperfect indicators of characteristics of the facilities, and they yield nearly identical implications. We find that a community-level, subjective perception of a family planning facility's quality has a significant impact on community members' contraceptive use whereas other community measures such as time, distance, and subjective perception of accessibility have trivial and insignificant direct impacts, net of the control variables. Future research that uncovers the determinants of perceptions of both community-level and individual-level quality could provide key insights for developing effective and efficient family planning programs.
ISSN:0070-3370
1533-7790
DOI:10.2307/2648132