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Women’s socioeconomic status and choice of birth control method: an investigation for the case of Turkey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Deniz Karaoğlan Open the ORCID record for Deniz Karaoğlan [Opens in a new window]  and
Dürdane Şirin Saraçoğlu
Deniz Karaoğlan*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Gebze Technical University, Kocaeli, Turkey
Dürdane Şirin Saraçoğlu
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
*
*Corresponding author. Email: hdyurtseven@gtu.edu.tr
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Abstract

This study investigated whether woman’s education, labour market status and the status within the household have any impact on their birth control behaviour in Turkey. Empirical analyses were implemented using the 2013 Demographic and Health Survey dataset, which includes information on women’s socioeconomic status and their current choice of contraceptives: whether they used any method, and if so, what method they used. Using a bivariate probit model with selection to control for any possible selection bias, the results suggest that whether a woman uses any birth control method, and whether the woman chooses modern methods over traditional methods, are primarily explained by education level and urban/rural residence, and that the determinants of contraceptive use vary across college-educated and non-college-educated women. The results also indicate that non-employed women are less likely to use any birth control method compared with women with regular, full-time jobs. However the effect was statistically insignificant.

Keywords

FertilityContraceptive choiceWomen’s socioeconomic status
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Biosocial Science , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 137 - 156
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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