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Abstract
The study highlights net effects of selected socio-economic, demographic and cultural factors on the prevalence and treatment-seeking behaviour for reproductive morbidity in India on the basis of self-reported reproductive health problems elicited from 84,862 currently married women aged 15–49 in the second National Family Health Survey, 1998–1999 (NFHS-2). Information was elicited on treatment sought, if any, from private or public health service providers from 34,034 women suffering from reproductive tract infections (RTIs). The study employed binary and multinomial logit regression techniques for respectively analysing prevalence and treatment-seeking behaviour. The prevalence of RTIs in India is quite high (40 per cent) and the treatment-seeking is extremely low (33 per cent). Usage of female sterilization and Intra-Uterine Device (IUD) significantly compounds the reproductive morbidity in India, possibly because of negligence in post-operative or post-insertion care. Women suffering from abdominal pain or intercourse-related complications have a higher likelihood of seeking treatment for RTIs.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to the editor and anonymous reviewers for the extremely useful comments and suggestions that facilitated an improvement in the quality of this paper from its earlier version.
Notes
1. Standard of living of households was based on the possession of household inventories like radios, televisions, bicycles, two-wheelers and four-wheelers. The weights assigned to the possession of individual household inventories is inverse of the percentage of households possessing the item and accordingly, the weights assigned to individual items were those such as radios or bicycles (two), refrigerators or two-wheelers (seven), and four-wheelers (41). The assigned weights were added up, and the categorizations of the households subject to the total score for possession of the individual inventory items were very low, low, medium and high, pertaining to total score ranges of 0, 2–6, 7–20, 21–61 respectively.
2. Proper interpretations of increase or decrease in odds ratios in the multinomial regression analysis are provided in one of the author's earlier studies (Gulati et al. Citation2007). For further details on formulations, estimation procedures, and proper or cautious interpretations of the multiplicative effects in the multinomial logit model, one can consult the technical literature on causal analysis (Retherford et al. Citation1993).