Assessment of Family Planning practices From Social Marketing perspective In the case of Gondar Town

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.