Husband—wife inconsistencies in contraceptive use responses

Summary The reliability of responses in fertility surveys to questions on topics such as contraceptive use has long been a subject of concern. This paper explores one type of response reliability — the consistency between spouses in their responses to questions on use of contraception — using survey and case study data from a sample of rural Indian husbands and wives. The findings suggest that response inconsistencies between husband and wife appear to result primarily from wives underreporting the actual use of contraception, and that such underreporting may in turn be traced to the subordinate status of women within the family in this society in conjunction with familial and normative values which are opposed to contraception. Response inconsistencies, and the manner in which they are resolved, are shown to have important implications for both overall estimates of contraceptive prevalence as well as for household-level analyses of fertility behaviour.