This study examined the awareness level and attitude of family planning among rural dwellers in the South western part of Nigeria and its consequences on population/economy of Nigeria. Data were gathered from 300 respondents who were randomly selected from Seriki rural communities of western Nigeria using proportional allocation of the stratified random sampling technique. The research considered to know the level of awareness between the traditional family planning methods and modern methods of contraception. The modern methods were found to be more significantly embraced than traditional family planning methods based on the analysis of the result obtained which showed that 175% preferred modern methods while 125% preferred traditional methods. The factors considered in examining these are educational background, economic factors, marital status, social factor, ethnicity and illiteracy level; the data collected based on these factors are analyzed using principal component anal ysis technique in order to determine the most prevalent factor that causes attitudinal problems. The results give rise to the Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors of the components, whereby the variance proportion for each is given as 0.4844, 0.2391, 0.1480, 0.0597, 0.0461 and 0.0227 for economics, educational background, ethnicity, illiteracy, marital status and social status respectively, thereby qualifying the factors as the first PC, second PC, third PC, fourth PC, fifth PC and sixth PC respectively. Thus, economic factor which is the first PC is the factor that is predominantly responsible for the discovered low level of awareness and poor attitudinal behavior towards family planning.
Family planning implies the ability of individuals and couples to anticipate and attain their desired number of children by spacing and timing their births. It is achieved through the use of contraceptive methods and the treatment of involuntary fertility. The availability of family planning does more than enabling women and men to limit family size. It safeguards individual health and right and improves the quality of life of couples and their children.
Family planning has attracted attentions all over the world due to its relevance in decision making, population growth and development. Family planning is defined as birth spacing, preventing unwanted pregnancies or secure wanted pregnancy. [
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The practices of modern contraceptives method offer many advantages compared to traditional approaches, in health and economy of the couples in the country. Family planning programs that stimulate modern approaches, policies and methods have become increasingly important in the last decades as a result of the social-economic problems influencing rapid population growth, as well as public health problems, especially control of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) such as AIDS [
The study area of this research is Seriki community in Ogun State and is accessible by land. The community comprises of different ethnic groups namely Yoruba’s, Igbo, Hausa, Calabar, Isoko, Ijaws, just to mention but few. The Yoruba’s are considered to be the more than any other tribes in the city, because it is located at the western part of Nigeria. According to the unpublished census figure of 2006, its population size was estimated at a total of 2075. The community was divided into nine (9) strata and a sample size of 335 estimated through Taro Yanmeni’s formula was randomly selected among focus group of age 15 - 30+ comprises of single ladies, married couple and the divorced people using proportional allocation of Stratified random sampling technique.
Designed questionnaire was examined on the selected sample size under three (3) different categories. The instrument sought to solicit responses on area of residence, age at marriage, and highest educational qualification, duration or age of marriage, and number of children owned. The second category of the questionnaire covers the factors that encourage large families and their general perception on family planning. The major factors considered here are educational background, economic factors, marital status, social factor, ethnicity and illiteracy level. The third part purely seeks information on family planning acceptance in both modern and traditional way. At the end of the survey, a cronbach’s alpha validity rest was run on a sample of 100 respondents for reliability measures and the survey was found to be 81.2% reliable. This analysis was based on responses from the last two categories being the categories that cover the research questions.
The analytical technique adopted for this research is a Multivariate analysis technique known as Principal Component Analysis.
It is a statistical procedure that uses an orthogonal transformation to convert a set of observations of possibly correlated variables into a set of values of linearly uncorrelated variables called principal components. This transformation is defined in such a way that the first principal component has the largest possible variance (that is, accounts for as much of the variability in the data as possible), and each succeeding component in turn has the highest variance possible under the constraint that it is orthogonal to the preceding components. The principal components are orthogonal because they are the Eigen vectors of the covariance matrix, which is symmetric.
If the variables Y 1 , Y 2 , ⋯ , Y p in Y are correlated, the ellipsoidal swarm of point is not oriented parallel to any of the axis. The axes can be rotated by multiplying each yi by an orthogonal matrix A and thus obtain
Z i = A Y i (1)
Since A is an orthogonal, A ′ A = I and the distance to the origin is unchanged. Thus we want to sample covariance matrix of Z S Z = A S A ′ to be diagonal.
Z S Z = A S A ′ = { S 2 z 1 0 0 0 S 2 z 1 0 0 0 S 2 z 1 } (2)
Thus the orthogonal matrix A that diagonalizes S is the transpose of the matrix C.
A = C I = [ a 1 a 2 a p ] (3)
For every square matrix A, a scalar λ and a nonzero vector x can be found such that A x = λ x . It should be known that λ is called an eigenvalue of A, and x is an eigenvector of A corresponding to λ. To find λ and x, we write the equation as as ( A − λ I ) x = 0 .
If | A − λ I | = 0 , then ( A − λ I ) has an inverse and x = 0 is the only solution. Hence, in order to obtain nontrivial solutions, we set | A − λ I | = 0 to find values of λ that can be used to find corresponding values of x. Thus, in ( A − λ I ) x = 0 , the matrix A − λ I must be singular in order to find a solution vector x that is not 0.
Suppose we have a 3 × 3 matrix A with eigenvectors X1, X2, X3, and eigenvalues l1, l2, l3 so that
A x 1 = l 1 x 1 , A x 2 = l 2 x 2 , A x 3 = l 3 x 3
thus,
A [ X 1 X 2 X 3 ] = [ X 1 X 2 X 3 ] [ λ 1 0 0 0 λ 2 0 0 0 λ 3 ] (4)
The eigenvalues will then be used to compute the variance of the principal components and we can speak of the proportion of variance explained by the first K component.
We will derive our first algebraic solution to PCA using linear algebra. This solution is based on an important property of eigenvector decomposition. The sample correlation between the jth and kth variables is defined as Covariances XTX itself can be recognized as proportional to the empirical sample covariance matrix of the dataset X.
See Figures 1-2, Tables 1-4.
In
According to
PC1 = 0. 5253 0 5 ( E . F ) + 0. 498518 ( E . D ) − 0. 295534 ( ethnicity ) − 0. 463585 ( illiteracy ) + 0. 339941 ( M . S ) − 0. 24 0 255 ( S . F ) . (5)
E.F | E.B | ETHNICITY | ILLITERACY | MARRIAGE_ STATUS | SOCIAL_ FACTOR | |
ECONOMIC_ FACTOR | 1.000000 | |||||
E.B | 0.853992 | 1.000000 | ||||
ETHNICITY | −0.260151 | −0.174099 | 1.000000 | |||
ILLITERACY | −0.688533 | −0.683219 | 0.134808 | 1.000000 | ||
MARRIAGE_ STATUS | 0.353807 | 0.234607 | −0.719295 | −0.217871 | 1.000000 | |
SOCIAL_FACTOR | −0.247535 | −0.224509 | 0.137374 | 0.281727 | −0.132131 | 1.000000 |
Variable | PC 1 | PC 2 | PC 3 | PC 4 | PC 5 | PC 6 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
E.F | 0.525305 | 0.192413 | 0.174055 | 0.349704 | 0.099909 | −0.724197 |
E.B | 0.498518 | 0.289330 | 0.192530 | 0.413398 | −0.079352 | 0.673428 |
ETHNICITY | −0.295534 | 0.653014 | −0.005069 | −0.029402 | 0.695535 | 0.039670 |
ILLITERACY | −0.463585 | −0.295967 | −0.043416 | 0.825845 | 0.116089 | −0.010534 |
M.S | 0.339941 | −0.601188 | 0.065349 | −0.117261 | 0.696298 | 0.141992 |
S.F | −0.240255 | −0.061762 | 0.962526 | −0.100871 | −0.040569 | −0.013651 |
PC2 = 0. 192413 ( E . F ) + 0. 28933 0 ( E . B ) + 0. 653 0 14 ( ethnicity ) − 0. 295967 ( illiteracy ) − 0. 6 0 1188 ( M . S ) − 0.0 61762 ( S . F ) . (6)
PC3 = 0. 174 0 55 ( E . F ) + 0. 19253 0 ( E . B ) − 0.00 5 0 69 ( ethnicity ) − 0.0 43416 ( illiteracy ) + 0.0 65349 ( M . S ) + 0. 962526 ( S . F ) . (7)
PC4 = 0. 3497 0 4 ( E . F ) + 0. 413398 ( E . B ) − 0.0 294 0 2 ( ethnicity ) + 0. 825845 ( illiteracy ) − 0. 117261 ( M . S ) − 0. 1 00 871 ( S . F ) . (8)
PC5 = 0.0 999 0 9 ( E . F ) − 0.0 79352 ( E . B ) + 0. 695535 ( ethnicity ) + 0. 116 0 89 ( illiteracy ) + 0. 696298 ( M . S ) − 0.0 4 0 569 ( S . F ) . (9)
PC6 = − 0. 724197 ( E . F ) + 0. 673428 ( E . B ) + 0.0 3967 0 ( ethnicity ) − 0.0 1 0 534 ( illetracy ) + 0. 141992 ( M . S ) − 0.0 13651 ( S . F ) . (10)
In line with Equations (5) to (10), PC1 to PC6 represent the six stated factors respectively and the first principal component is positively correlated with three out of six of the original variables while others experienced negative correlation. Thus, the first principal component increases with the increase in economic factor, educational background and marriage status and this suggest that these three criteria vary together. If one increases, then the remaining two also increase. This component can be viewed as a measure of the quality of economic factor, educational background and marriage status. Furthermore, we see that the first principal component correlate moderately with the economic factor. In fact, we could state that based on the correlation of 0.525 that this principal component is a primary measure of the economic factor. It would follow that communities with high values would tend to have a lot of economic factor available around them in terms of economic status, type of family and this shows that economic factor will affect family planning in the community.
The second principal component also increases with ethnicity, educational background and economic factor. This component can be viewed as a measure of the degree of ethnicity in the community with a positive value of 0.65. Thus, this principal component is the primary measure of ethnicity which indicates that ethnicity also affects the attitudes to family planning in the community.
The third principal component is highly correlated with social factor with value of 0.962 follow by educational background, economic factor and marriage status. It implies that this component is the primary measure of social factor in the community. Thus, a degraded level of social factor within the community has had serious effect on their family planning attitudes.
The fourth principal component also strongly correlated with illiteracy level in the community with a value of 0.825, follow by educational background and economic factor. This component is the primary measure of illiteracy in the community, which indicates that there is high level of illiteracy in the community which is also affecting the family planning attitudes in the area.
The fifth principal component is the primary measure of marital status with a value of 0.696. This implies that marriage status of the focus group have strongly impacted on the community’s attitudes to family planning in the area.
The sixth principal component is the primary measure of educational background with value of 0.67 follow by marriage status, which indicate that educational background contributes a lot to the attitudes of family planning in the area.
“
Eigenvalues: (Sum = 6, Average = 1) | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Cumulative | Cumulative | ||||
Number | Value | Difference | Proportion | Value | Proportion |
1 | 2.906611 | 1.472286 | 0.4844 | 2.906611 | 0.4844 |
2 | 1.434325 | 0.546397 | 0.2391 | 4.340936 | 0.7235 |
3 | 0.887928 | 0.529765 | 0.1480 | 5.228865 | 0.8715 |
4 | 0.358163 | 0.081266 | 0.0597 | 5.587028 | 0.9312 |
5 | 0.276897 | 0.140822 | 0.0461 | 5.863925 | 0.9773 |
6 | 0.136075 | −−− | 0.0227 | 6.000000 | 1.0000 |
Unrotated Loadings | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
F1 | F2 | Communality | Uniqueness | ||
ECONOMIC_FACTOR | 0.888934 | 0.188602 | 0.825774 | 0.174226 | |
E.D | 0.840691 | 0.301768 | 0.797825 | 0.202175 | |
ETHNICITY | −0.436040 | 0.651089 | 0.614048 | 0.385952 | |
ILLITERACY | −0.711991 | −0.246761 | 0.567822 | 0.432178 | |
MARRIAGE_STATUS | 0.511711 | −0.620111 | 0.646385 | 0.353615 | |
SOCIAL_FACTOR | −0.300303 | −0.013913 | 0.090376 | 0.909624 | |
Factor | Variance | Cumulative | Difference | Proportion | Cumulative |
F1 | 2.546057 | 2.546057 | 1.549884 | 0.718772 | 0.718772 |
F2 | 0.996173 | 3.542231 | −−− | 0.281228 | 1.000000 |
Total | 3.542231 | 3.542231 | 1.000000 |
ness). Thus, all the variables (factors) considered in this research are correlated since the ellipsoidal swarm of point is not oriented parallel to any of the axis as exhibited in
This research provides insights into the local contexts related to family planning knowledge, attitudes, perceptions, and practices and also highlights the need for contraceptives, both modern and traditional methods. In the wake of changing attitudes towards family planning and desired family size among rural dwellers, more women and couples will be seeking family planning services. Addressing obstacles such as access, affordability, and availability will help meet these needs and ensure that women and couples can meet their childbearing and reproductive
health goals. In addition, a very low perceived need for contraception was found amongst the respondents wishing to bear more children. The result shows that the most important factors that affect people awareness are economic factor and educational background and they jointly have the highest variance proportion and the highest Eigenvalue which is greater than 1.
In view of the above, the following recommendations were however made:
1. The government should provide social economic factors that would increase the knowledge of education among the people which will improve their level of understanding of family planning.
2. In Nigeria, the bulk of the population lives in the rural areas. The government should therefore emphasize modern methods of family planning to complement the traditional methods, provide adequate fund for family planning officials to enable them procure the necessary devices and reach the rural dwellers.
3. Due to the fact that economic factors in the country are very poor, it is advisable for the people to reduce their child bearing in order to reduce the population of the country so that the provision of government amenities will be sufficient enough for community.
The study also recommends strong need for involving men in healthcare programs designed to improve women’s and newborns’ health as they mostly influence decision-making at the household level and this will also result in active male participation and community ownership. For Young, especially the first time, fathers need support and empowerment. Encouraging communication between wife and husband about family planning and birth spacing should also be part of such campaigns to promote mutual decision-making between wife and husband and make husbands responsible partners in family planning/birth spacing decisions and ease the burden of decision-making on women.
Ayoola, F.J., Adeboye, N.O. and Balogun, K. (2017) On the Investigation of Awareness Level of Family Planning among Rural Dwellers in Nigeria (Principal Component Analysis Approach). Open Access Library Journal, 4: e3762. https://doi.org/10.4236/oalib.1103762