The Effect of TV/Radio Media Family Planning Messages on Modern Contraceptive Use among Women: Empirical Evidence from the Philippines

Abstract

The Republic of the Philippines has been trying since the 1960s to reduce high fertility rates to promote economic growth and eradicate poverty. This study employs propensity score matching to estimate the effect of TV/radio, TV, and radio family planning (FP) messages on the probability of women’s current and intended future use of modern contraception. I found that women exposed to TV/radio FP messages are 3 percentage points (p.p.) [95% CI: .008, .055] more likely to use modern contraception than women who were not exposed to these messages. Likewise, watching FP messages on TV increases the probability of using modern contraception by around 4 p.p. [95% CI: .011, .066]. FP messages on radio have no effect on modern contraceptive use, however. Sub-analyses reveal that exposure to TV/radio media FP messages has no effect on modern contraceptive use among women with lower educational attainment, or among women with lower levels of wealth.

Keywords:

• Asia
• access to healthcare
• family planning
• healthcare
• gender
• women

Notes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the reviewers for giving helpful comments and suggestions, Professor Charles Towe, Professor Tatiana Andreyeva, Professor Nathan Fiala, at the department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Connecticut.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The 2017 Philippine Demographic and Health Survey Data that the author used in the study is public available. Interested audience can be accessed at: https://dhsprogram.com/methodology/survey/survey-display-510.cfm.

Notes

1 Natural family planning methods includes the calendar-based method, the symptoms-based method, and the breastfeeding method.

2 Since the 1993 survey, the Philippines DHS no longer collects data for health services availability questionnaires.

3 I categorized the women who responded that they are not sure about future use into not intending contraception use.

4 They are omitted because the aim of this analysis is to estimate the effect on the current use of modern contraception. The survey question is, ‘Are you currently using modern contraception?’. The currently pregnant women compose 4 per cent of all the women interviewed in the survey.

5 The survey question for future use is, ‘If you don’t currently use any family planning methods, are you considering using family planning methods in the future?’.

6 ‘Fertility intention’ is constructed as a binary variable, which takes a value of 1 if a woman does not want to have more children at all or if she wants a child only after 2+ years from now, and 0 if otherwise.