Abstract:
The main objective of this study was to examine the influence of religion on FP and contraceptive utilization. This cross-sectional study was conducted in Morogoro Municipality, which employed questionnaires and interviews to collected data from 220 respondents. The study population included 200 respondents who are religious followers and 20 respondents were religious leaders. Qualitative data was analyzed using context analysis and quantitative data was analyzed by using SPSS version 21.0 to examine the influence of religion and other factors on family planning and contraceptive utilization in Morogoro Municipality. Findings of this study have shown that, family planning and contraceptive utilization differ across religions and denominations. For instance, it was revealed that 31.7% of Muslims used withdrawal method, 10% use condom, 6.7% use
Standard Days Method, 5% use pills while 46.6% do not use any method, compared to Christians 25% of whom uses Standard Days Method, 18% uses pills, 18% uses condoms, 7% uses withdrawal method while the remaining 32% do not use any method of family planning. The findings indicated that religion has no significant influence on FP and contraceptive utilization as p-value was 0.070, above the alpha level of 0.05.
Hence, in ranking, other factors has more influence than religion because they have shown statistical significance in influencing family planning and contraceptive utilization. In particular, these factors include sex (OR=5.0, 95% CI 2.053-12.427) with -value=0.000, age (OR=0.3, 95% CI 0.111-1.080) with p-value=0.058, distance (OR=0.05, 95% CI 0.020-0.0127) with p-value=0.000, availability of FP commodities (OR=2.9, 95% CI 1.245-6.997) with p-value=0.011, friendliness of health providers OR=3.0, 95% CI 1.344-6.734) with p-value=0.006 and side effects of contraceptives (OR=0.2, 95% CI 0.074-0.390) with p-value=0.000.
However, in interpreting these findings, factors like sex, availability of family planning commodities and friendliness of health providers significantly increase the use of family planning and contraceptives, however, distance and side effects of contraceptives significantly decrease the use of family planning and contraceptives. In addition, as the age of people increase above 39 years old, the use of family planning and contraceptives fall.
