Spousal Discrepancy in Reporting Contraceptive Use

Elyse Jennings , Harvard University
Rachael Pierotti, The World Bank Group

This paper will describe discrepancies in spouses’ reports of contraceptive use and analyze the factors that may contribute to these discrepancies. I use data on 322 spouse pairs from the Chitwan Valley Family Study in rural Nepal whose contraceptive use was followed monthly between 1997 and 2013. Here I focus on temporary, reversible methods of contraception, and find that there are several months during which wives reported different use of contraception from what their husbands reported. Using logistic regression, I analyze whether varying degrees of marital arrangement by parents/relatives, marital duration, and spouses’ reported love for one another help to predict these discrepancies. I find that many of these marital characteristics do help to predict discrepancy in spouses’ reports of contraceptive use, and that husbands’ and wives’ characteristics can be predictive of discrepant reports in opposing directions.

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 Presented in Session 119. Couple Dynamics of Sex, Contraception, and Fertility