Designing research to study the attributes of fertility regulation methods
Pareek, U.; Rao, T.V.
Health Management 4(1): 6-8
1990
ISSN/ISBN: 0159-1959 PMID: 12316682 Document Number: 373207
A framework for identifying desirable and undesirable attribute of family planning methods in a given culture can be constructed by classifying aspects of the attributes, and then using any of several statistical techniques to analyze the results. Acceptability of a fertility regulation method is a function of the users personality (UP), the perceived attributes of the method (MA), the influence sources (IS), and the communication process (CP). All of these functions interact with each other. Attributes can be classified as objective, which are known and culture-free; subjective, such as perceived effectiveness, risk, convenience, secrecy or pain; and sterotypical, which are associated attributes with no factual basis, such as the belief that IUDs cause cancer. Attributes can be positive or negative. Suggested research designs include weightages of attributes as by popularity; scaling of attributes by importance, by equal-appearing interval, by Q- sort, by summated rating, by semantic difference or by pair-comparison techniques; combinations of attributes; and multivariate analysis of attributes.