Predicting contraceptive use in Bangladesh: a logistic regression analysis.

Family planning knowledge, attitude and practice surveys typically assess respondents' reproductive attitudes and intentions to use contraception. Longitudinal observation of individual respondents nevertheless shows that such questions are not strongly predictive of subsequent behaviour. This study examines 3 years' data which show that a set of such responses to questions are nevertheless substantially superior in predicting behaviour than any single indicator. Thus statistical techniques which bring into account the apparent multidimensionality of contraceptive motivation can greatly improve upon the estimation of future practice of family planning in a population.