Assessment of Unmet Need for Family Planning and it's Association with Reproductive Behaviour of Women in Rural Jaipur

Introduction: The concept of unmet need refers to a gap between someone’s stated fertility preferences and his or her contraceptive use at a given point of time. The concept can serve as a basis for identifying subgroups that are in need of programmatic action. Thus, estimation of unmet need is a powerful concept for family planning programmes. The aim of present study was to estimate the unmet need for family planning and it's association with reproductive behaviour of women with the unmet need. Materials and methods: A community based cross sectional study was carried out among rural women in Jaipur. Total 550 women were interviewed by systematic random sampling and a pre-designed and pre-tested questionnaire was used to record the informations. The data were entered into Microsoft Excel 2010 spreadsheets and analyzed using “Chi square test” of significance to find out association between unmet need and reproductive behaviour of women. Results: In the present study, 17.82% women of reproductive age group had an unmet need for family planning, of which 12% had unmet need for limiting and 5.82% for spacing the births. The unmet need was significantly associated with age at marriage, duration of active married life, age at first child birth, total number of living children and total number of male and female children. Lack of motivation (41.84%), various obstacles (35.71%) and lack of information (22.45%) were the major reasons for unmet need. Conclusion: Our study showed a higher unmet need in the study area as compared to national and state average, showing a need for an effective education campaign and awareness programme among the study population.