Utilisation and Preference of Contraceptives among Women of Reproductive Age in Rural Communities of Jos North, Plateau State, Nigeria

Abstract

Despite the high population growth and fertility rate of women in Nigeria, contraceptive prevalence is one of the lowest in the world at 15%; however, every year, nearly 16 million teenagers aged 15-19 years give birth, and 95% of these births take place in resource-limited countries. Contraception is the act of intentionally preventing pregnancy using various devices such as good sexual practices, chemicals, drugs, or surgical procedures. This study aimed to assess the utilisation and contraceptive preference among women of reproductive age in Jos North, Plateau State, Nigeria. A cross-sectional survey that adopts the multi-staged sampling technique to select 396 women and data collected through an informed structured questionnaire between September 2021 to March 2022 and after that analysed with the statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) version 21 presented in contingency tables, charts and percentages while inferential statistical analysis was done using Spearman Rho ranked order correlation to test for statistical significance of variables based on p<0.05. Most (84.8%) of the respondents were married, and 40.2% fell between 20-29. Most (88.1%) women had one form of formal education. Similarly, 95.4% of their partners had formal education, indicating that most had secondary school education as their highest educational qualification, and so did their partners. In comparison, most (93.4%) of the respondent women had between 1-5 children per family, with the majority (44.9%) having either one or two children, of which 89.9% had used family planning methods before with 71.0% of them currently using these methods rated to be moderately good. In comparison, the majority (81.3%) of the participants had plans to continue using these methods. This study revealed that rural women of reproductive age in the Jos North Local government area have been using, would still and intend to use contraceptives in the future to prevent maternal morbidity. The choices made by them preferred the hormonal injection methods as a matter of priority to increase the satisfactory utilisation of planned parenthood. Thus, nurses should be aware of particularly the preferred contraceptive choice of the women in rendering health care services to improve their level of utilisation.