Virtual Brown Bag: Exploring User-Centered Counseling in Contraceptive Decision-Making: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Urban Malawi
Date: Wednesday, February 17, 2021
Time: 3:00 to 4:30 pm SAST
Presenter slides and a blog will be available in the days following the event.
Abstract
As a means to achieve full, free, and informed choice and promote reproductive autonomy, family planning programs have increasingly begun to adopt user-centered approaches to counseling and service provision. However, little is known about how these approaches may shape women's and couple's preferences and choices. In this 2-year field study, funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, we recruited a total of 782 women in urban Lilongwe and tested how a woman-centered, preference-based approach to counseling may help women to realize their family planning preferences by means of a multifactorial randomized controlled trial.
Our findings show that women who received targeted counseling were 16.8 percent less likely to be using their stated ideal method of contraception at follow-up and were 12.1 percent more likely to be unsatisfied with their contraceptive method at follow-up. This may be, plausibly due to their inability to act on their updated preferences for methods. On the other hand, women who were encouraged to invite their husbands to the counseling session were 15 percent less likely to change their method from counseling to follow-up, 25.4 percent more likely to switch methods between counseling and follow-up, and 17.0 percent more likely to be using their stated ideal method at follow-up. Women assigned to husband invitation group were no more satisfied with their current method at follow-up. While both approaches aimed to achieve the goal of helping women make informed choices on family planning, neither seems to yield better outcomes for women.
Presenters
- Mahesh Karra, Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy, Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University
- Kexin Zhang, PhD student at the Department of Economics at Boston University
Moderator
- Bob Baulch, Program Leader/ Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI Malawi
Individuals attending this event may be audio taped, videotaped, or photographed during the course of a meeting, and by attending grant permission for their likenesses and the content of their comments, if any, to be broadcast, webcast, published, or otherwise reported or recorded. Questions? Please contact IFPRI-Lilongwe@cgiar.org
