Agreement and concordance between married couples regarding family planning utilization and fertility intention in Dukem, Ethiopia

BACKGROUND: Traditionally, women have been the main respondents for most of knowledge, attitude and practice survey related to family planning and fertility intention. However it is not well known how responses of women about husbands reflect the husband’s attitude and practices. Thus this study is conducted to examine agreement of wife and husband regarding family planning use and fertility desire in Dukem, Ethiopia. METHODS: A community based cross sectional survey was conducted on 422 married couple’s in Dukem town, central Ethiopia which were selected by using systematic sampling method. The study was conducted from November, 2010 to December, 2010. Data pertaining to fertility intentions and contraception was collected and the level of agreement (kappa statistics) between husbands and wives was computed. RESULT: The observed concordance was 71.6% for ideal family size, 94.9% for contraceptive attitude, 95.9% for fertility desire, and 99.7% for report of number of currently living children. The unadjusted kappa statistic varied from 0.61(p<=0.000) for contraceptive attitude to high of 0.99(P<=0.000) for number of living children, for ideal family size 0.63(P<=0.000), fertility desire 0.91(P<=0.000), ever use of contraceptive 0.84(P<=0.000) and current use of contraceptive 0.87(P<=0.000) having kappa values in between. Overall greater degree of agreement was observed for reproductive health events as compared to family planning attitudes and intentions. CONCLUSION: In surveys pertaining to reproductive health events, the wife’s response may be taken as proxy for the couple’s response, but for assessing family planning attitudes and intentions, may require collecting information from husbands and wives separately.