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1、WHY WOMEN IN THE PHILIPPINES PRACTICE FAMILY PLANNING: A QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE ANALYSISbyD. Lawrence Kincaid Associate Director Center for Communication Programs and Associate Scientist Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences Department of Health Policy and Management Johns Hopkins Universi
2、ty 111 Market Place-Suite 310 Baltimore, Maryland 21202 USA Tel: (410) 659-6269 Fax: (410) 659-6266 E-Mail: LKINCAIDJHUCCP.ORGA paper prepared for the Assistant Secretary of Health, Philippines, September 23, 1998, and presented at a seminar on communication and family planning, Manila, August, 2000
3、. 2Why Do Women Practice Family Planning?Such a simple question as why women practice family planning deserves a simple answer. The most direct way to find an answer is to ask women themselves and listen to what they have to say. Of course, if you listen to more than one woman you will get more than
4、 one answer. In fact, if you listen to one woman long enough you will get more than one answer. There is no single answer nor single reason, but many reasons why women practice family planning. Some of the reasons may even seem to contradict one another. Administering a structured questionnaire to a
5、 random sample of women is another way to find an answer, if the right questions are included. The advantage of a survey is that it makes it possible to conduct a statistical analysis to determine the distribution and variation of factors that may influence women to practice family planning. The adv
6、antage of a relatively unstructured interview or focus group discussion is that the women themselves have more freedom to answer the way that they want to answer. Sometimes those answers are very surprising indeed. This paper will provide both types of information which are relevant to the question,
7、 using a reanalysis of qualitative data from focus group discussions conducted in the Philippines in 1991, and an analysis of a national sample survey of Filipino women conducted in 1996.1 Existing theory can also be used to answer the question, but this source of knowledge will be discussed after s
8、eeing what women say for themselves. So, what do women say about their reasons for practice family planning?Reason Number 1. To Prevent or Delay Getting Pregnant The most obvious reason why women practice family planning is to keep from getting pregnant and to reduce their fertility. “Desired fertil
9、ity,” “fertility preference,” or “desired family size” is the most straightforward reason why women practice family planning, and the one usually used by demographers and economists.2 How do women themselves express their preferences?Newly married women simply want children. “We wanted to have kids
10、right away.” Women who already have had children want to wait, “So that theres a gap between pregnancies/giving birth.” But at some point the number of children becomes an important issue: “Parents seem to have some kind of magic number of children that they would like or prefer to have, which is ma
11、inly two or four.” “They say its a balanced number.one boy one girl.or two sons and two daughters.” The national survey of 1563 women revealed that 84 percent of all women want between 2 and 4 children, and that the average desired number of children is 3.4. Younger women, however, want three or few
12、er children. The data suggest that Filipino 1 Both studies were conducted by TRENDS-MBL, Inc., a market research agency in the Philippines. The FGD study was conducted in 1991 among 24 groups of women and 12 group of men in Nueva Ecija, Bicol, Cebu, and Zamoanga. The national sample survey of 1563 w
13、omen was conducted in 1996. 2 Although we will continue to use “women” as the focus of attention, as we shall see later, “husbands” and even “families” are often the locus of decision making regarding family planning.3women are moving towards the two-child family as the ideal. Forty-six percent of w
14、omen ages 15-19 only want two children, and 87% want three or fewer. Two-thirds of all women between the ages of 15 and 35 want three or fewer children. Even though women themselves can express purely numerical preferences, they readily begin attaching other reasons or values to desirable numbers:“W
15、e only want two, thats about all we can afford to support.” “It is the number that is masaya (a happy lot) for the family.” In psychological terms, when someone attributes a positive or negative value to a behavior or object, they are expressing their attitude towards it. The practice of family plan
16、ning is associated with a wide variety of positive attributes or consequences in the Philippines. Some of these express positive consequences for ones children and husband, or for the family in general; others express attitudes about positive outcomes for oneself. Because others are usually mentioned first, lets examine them before turning to the perceived benefits to women themsel
