ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS
Contraceptive Practice in Greater Legazpi: An Application of the Fertility Component System
by Helen Solis-David, Master of Arts in Demography (1980)
Using Bogue’s approach, the three-year contraceptive history of 1,103 respondents were analyzed and found that the decline in marital general fertility rate from 254 births per 1,000 MWRA’s after acceptance at the clinic was attributable to the following factors:
- Quadrupling of time(from14.5 to 62.2 percent) spent using contraception with more time using highly effective methods (pills, IUD, sterilization);
- Reduction by one-third of the time spent not using and contraception from 47.6 to 16.0 percent; and
- Reduction by half of the time spent pregnant from 28.6 to 14.9 percent.
It was likewise shown that higher contraception use rates or higher continuation rates were found among older, higher parity women who were of relatively socioeconomic status, had previous family planning experience, received information and services primarily from doctors, and were encouraged by their husbands to practice family planning.
Hence, pregnancy rates were found to be higher among younger women of low parity and low socioeconomic status.
Using Potter’s and Tietze’s life-table approach for measuring contraceptive effectiveness, it was observed that two years after acceptance, IUD acceptors registered the highest continuation rate; rhythm acceptors, second; condom, third; and pill acceptors, the lowest continuation rate.
However, the first-method net failure rate was highest for rhythm acceptors, second for condom acceptors, find third for pill acceptors. There was no incidence of pregnancy among IUD acceptors.
It was further shown that all-method continuation rates were higher than first method continuation rates especially 12 months after acceptance. However, all-method failure rates were higher than first-method failure rates with the difference between the two rates increasing over time.
Overall pregnancy rates were found to be much higher than all-method net failure rates and clearly showed that as far as long-term protection from further pregnancies is needed, only IUD coud be recommended as the most effective contraceptive method.
Although information on reliability and effectiveness of the different contraceptive methods could be obtained Bogue’s fertility component technique, the author has some reservations as the usefulness of this approach to a large sample as evident in the difficulty encountered in the collection of the contraceptive history data and due to the difficulty in training not only a big, but more important, group of qualified interviewers.