Abstract:
Abstract
When the population growth of a nation does not match with the socio-economic development, it
crates burden for the overall development, and reduce the country’s ability to improve the lives
of the citizen. Ethiopia is one of the countries which face the problem of high population growth.
The population of Ethiopia increases nearly seven times from 11.8 million at the beginning of the
20th century to above 90 million today. Therefore, attention of many researchers is shifted to the
area of family planning (FP), which is considered to be as a means to have planned population
growth and sustainable overall development. The purpose of the study is to analyze the
knowledge, attitude and practice of family planning, while identifying the factors affecting
individual behaviors of family planning and contraceptive use. Additionally, an assessment of
promotional activities use by social marketers to increase the awareness and knowledge,
reducing the factors negatively affecting the behavior of consumers to adopt FP methods was
made. Finally, the results of study indicated that there exist a significant relation between age,
marital status, and number of children with the user status/practice of contraceptive knowledge.
Furthermore, socio-economic beliefs, perception about service quality, inconvenience, and lack
of experience were identified as the factors affecting individual behavior of FP usage, with
awareness found to be positively associated with belief, attitude, and FP practice. Moreover,
individual perceptions and service quality were reported to be associated with socio-economic
beliefs, inconvenience, awareness and knowledge and FP experience, indicates that the usage of
integrated marketing communication by social marketers creates awareness about FP among the
respondents. The study area for the study was north Gondar administrative zone, Gondar town.
To conduct a study the researcher both exploratory and descriptive research deign were used.
The data collection instruments for the study were both survey method (questionnaire) and depth
interview.
Keywords: Social Marketing, Family Planning, Contraceptives, Beliefs, Attitudes.
