Television and women’s reproductive behavior: evidence from Uganda

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the relationship between television exposure and women’s reproductive behavior in Uganda. There is very little research that has explored the impact of television on the current adoption of modern contraceptives and to our knowledge, no studies have looked at the relationship between family planning programs on TV and the use of modern birth control in Uganda. We find that watching television and specifically watching family planning programs on television is positively associated with the current use of modern contraceptives. Increased frequency of watching TV is also associated with greater use of modern contraceptives. We further find that women exposed to television also changed other aspects of reproductive behavior – preference for a certain number of children and the decision to use any birth control to avoid pregnancy. Our results indicate that continued access to television and family planning programs on television has the potential to alter reproductive behavior and provide women with information and choice to adopt modern methods of birth control.

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08997764.2022.2099874

Notes

¹ A table in the appendix represents the context of our study within the relevant literature. The appendices are available as supplementary materials online.

² Other methods of birth control were the use of the folkloric method and traditional method, but the combined use of these are very small – 504 women reported using these methods.

³ The DHSs (Demographic Health Survey) do not contain questions on income.

⁴ A detailed description of the variables and the summary statistics are in the appendix.

⁵ We would like to thank a reviewer for suggesting this approach.

⁶ We choose variables that influence watching TV and family planning programs on TV.

⁷ While controlling on observable characteristics will reduce many of the differences between those who watch TV and those who do not, it does not account for the differences in unobservable characteristics such as knowledge and attitude that may induce women to watch TV. However, numerous studies have argued that the bias from such unobservables is small and PSM methods can produce accurate estimators (Diaz & Handa, 2006; Heckman et al., 1997, 1998a, 1998b). More importantly, since our data contains a rich set of control variables containing detailed individual and household characteristics, we are able to control for observable factors that determine whether a woman watches TV and family planning programs on TV.

⁸ The appendix contains the variance inflation factors (VIFs) from each regression.

⁹ After using each of the techniques to obtain the treatment effect, we perform balancing tests to see the reduction in bias. Bias is reduced significantly (see appendix tables A.9 till A.14, and the Love plots from tables A.15 till A.20).

¹⁰ We would like to thank our reviewer for suggesting this.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ishraq Ahmed

Ishraq Ahmed is an Assistant Professor of Economics in the School of Business at Black Hills State University. He holds a Master’s Degree in Economics from the University of Nottingham, UK, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Dickinson College and has extensive work experience with multilateral institutions, think tanks and research institutions in Switzerland, Singapore, and Bangladesh. His research interests are in the fields of Development Economics, Applied Microeconomics and Health Economics.