A Unified Model of Contraceptive Use Dynamics

Saifuddin Ahmed, Johns Hopkins University

It is of programmatic interest to examine how family planning programs affect contraceptive use dynamics. A major problem in analyzing contraceptive use dynamics, however, is the lack of an appropriate way of summarizing use behavior that concurrently explains contraceptive adoption, discontinuation, method switching, choice and failure - all of which may be affected by the quality of family planning programs. In current practice, these interrelated episodes are treated as disjoint events and analyzed independently by different statistical methods. In this paper we introduce a unified model of contraceptive use dynamics. The model is based on the general class of log-linear rate models where events are considered as the discrete-time competing hazards. Using the data from 1996-97 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey, this paper demonstrates the usefulness of model in analyzing the effectiveness of family planning worker visits on contraceptive use dynamics and shows flexibility in incorporating multi-level contexts.