Contraceptive switching among American women: A dynamic analysis of event history
Gu, Quanzhong
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Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/19874
Description
Title
Contraceptive switching among American women: A dynamic analysis of event history
Author(s)
Gu, Quanzhong
Issue Date
1994
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Swicegood, C. Gray
Department of Study
Sociology
Discipline
Sociology
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Women's Studies
Sociology, Individual and Family Studies
Sociology, Demography
Language
eng
Abstract
Based on the retrospective information on month-by-month contraceptive status provided by American women 15-44 years of age in the 1976 and the 1988 National Survey of Family Growth NSFG-II and NSFG-IV, the study uses a method of event history to examine how American women change their birth control practices as they pass through their reproductive life and how their patterns of contraceptive switching vary by social and demographic characteristics.
This study for the first time views women's contraceptive use in the context of family life cycle and work career, and examines the impacts of life events on birth control practices. The results clearly support the idea that important life course transitions affect the contraceptive behaviors of American women. Marriage tends to relax birth control practices more than to intensify them. Marriage also leads to greater involvement of husbands in birth control and greater use of methods that require partners' cooperation. Marital dissolution tends to increase the switching into more effective and coitus independent methods. Leaving the labor force increases a woman's possibility of switching into no contraception or use of a less effective method. Prior experience of an unplanned pregnancy is accompanied by higher rates of switching into method use, and use of highly effective methods, particularly among white women, unmarried women, and women in paid employment.
Dynamic models of contraceptive switching are estimated separately by women's race, marital and employment status with controls for a number of salient background factors including women's prior contraceptive status and husbands' characteristics for married women. The complex nature of contraceptive switching is interpreted as reflecting changes in contraceptive goals, contraceptive competence, contraceptive evaluation, and contraceptive accessibility associated with women's unfolding reproductive life course.
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