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He said, she said: husband-wife agreement, power relations, and contraceptive use in Turkey

Andrzej Kulczycki, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Couple-level studies of contraceptive communication and decision-making are lacking for Turkey, where women’s position in society is increasingly contested. We match data for 1906 married couples collected in the 1998 Turkish DHS, which indicated a contraceptive prevalence rate of 64%. Validity checks and tests for concurrence show relatively high concordance between spousal reports. We examine the effects of couple characteristics, effective partner communication about family planning, and interspousal power relations on the likelihood of adopting contraception. Multiple logistic regression analyses show that husband-wife communication, particularly as measured by respondent’s approval and perception of spousal approval toward family planning, are highly associated with current contraceptive use, but fertility preference and gender-system variables are not. We also compare models using either sex’s reports of contraceptive use as outcome. Results suggest that Turkish couples have moved toward a more egalitarian mode of contraceptive decision-making than typifies the Middle East and most developing countries.

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Presented in Session 33: Negotiation, communication and decision-making within couples in developing countries