Koenig Michael A, Acharya Rajib, Singh Sagri, Roy Tarun K
Department of Population and Family Health Sciences, The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, The Johns Hopkins University, 615 N. Wolfe Street, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA.
Popul Stud (Camb). 2006 Nov;60(3):243-56. doi: 10.1080/00324720600895819.
The validity of estimates of unintended childbearing has often been questioned, especially given their almost exclusive reliance on responses to survey questions that ask women to recall their intentions about past pregnancies. An opportunity to compare prospective and retrospective descriptions of intendedness was provided by a follow-up survey in four Indian states in 2002-2003 of rural woman originally interviewed in the 1998-99 National Family Health Survey-2. The results demonstrate a pronounced tendency for births prospectively classified as unwanted to be retrospectively described as having been wanted or mistimed. The main reason seems to be either that mothers adapt to the reality of a new birth or are reluctant to describe an existing child as having initially been unwanted. Our findings suggest that retrospective accounts of the wantedness of a birth, such as those obtained by current Demographic and Health Surveys, may lead to significant underestimates of true levels of unwanted childbearing.
意外生育估计数的有效性常常受到质疑，尤其是考虑到这些估计几乎完全依赖于对调查问题的回答，这些问题要求女性回忆她们过去怀孕时的意愿。2002 - 2003年在印度四个邦对1998 - 1999年第二次全国家庭健康调查中最初接受访谈的农村女性进行的跟踪调查，提供了一个比较预期生育意愿和回顾性生育意愿描述的机会。结果表明，那些预期被归类为意外生育的孩子，在回顾时很明显倾向于被描述为是想要的或时机不当的。主要原因似乎要么是母亲适应了新出生孩子的现实，要么是不愿意将现有的孩子描述为最初是不想要的。我们的研究结果表明，诸如当前人口与健康调查所获得的关于生育意愿的回顾性描述，可能会导致对意外生育的真实水平的严重低估。
