Measuring Living Standards in Demographic Surveys and Evaluating Their Impact on Unmet Need for Family Planning: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach

Paul Hewett, Population Council

In this paper, we focus our analysis on unmet need for contraception, drawing upon the Demographic and Health Surveys. Building on recent literature regarding the measurement of household living standards, we specify structural equations models (SEMS) for unmet need using estimation techniques developed by Jöreskog 1979, 2000, where household wealth is considered an unobserved latent factor. The crude consumer durables and housing quality variables routinely collected in the DHS are employed as observed indicators of this latent factor. The paper will focus on three measures of unmet need for family planning, a measure of unmet need among reproductive age women, and specific indicators of unmet need for spacing and limiting. The objective is to assess differential levels of unmet need by living standards and to evaluate spatially-concentrated aspects of poverty, e.g., do poor households in non-poor neighborhoods have different levels of unmet need than do poor households in poor neighborhoods?