Women's empowerment and contraceptive use are critical to achieving gender equality. The positive association between more empowered women and higher rates of contraceptive use has been well-established by cross-sectional research. However, there remains a gap in understanding the longitudinal relationship between contraceptive adoption and changes to women's empowerment. This study represents a novel approach to understanding the relationship between contraceptive adoption and women's empowerment longitudinally, at the individual level. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to measure the relationship between contraceptive adoption and women's empowerment using more than one wave of panel data. We leverage the longitudinal design of the Urban Reproductive Health Initiative data to code empowerment items by change over time (e.g., more empowered, no change, less empowered). We use sparse principal component analysis to establish empowerment change domains and calculate individual scores standardized by country-level averages. We estimate mixed effects models on these change domains, to investigate the link between contraceptive adoption and empowerment. We find common themes in empowerment across contexts—but contraceptive adoption has both positive and negative effects on those domains, and this varies across context. We discuss the need for cohort studies to examine this relationship.

中文翻译：

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肯尼亚、尼日利亚和塞内加尔的避孕药具采用率和赋权变化


妇女赋权和避孕药具的使用对于实现性别平等至关重要。横断面研究已经证实，更多女性赋权与更高避孕药具使用率之间存在正相关关系。然而，在理解避孕药具采用与妇女赋权变化之间的纵向关系方面仍然存在差距。这项研究代表了一种在个人层面上纵向理解避孕药具采用与妇女赋权之间关系的新颖方法。据作者所知，这是第一次尝试使用不止一波面板数据来衡量避孕药具采用与妇女赋权之间的关系。我们利用城市生殖健康倡议数据的纵向设计，通过随时间的变化来编码赋权项目（例如，更多赋权、不变、更少赋权）。我们使用稀疏主成分分析来建立赋权变化域并计算按国家平均水平标准化的个人得分。我们估计这些变化领域的混合效应模型，以调查避孕药具采用和赋权之间的联系。我们发现不同背景下的赋权有共同的主题，但避孕药具的采用对这些领域既有积极的影响，也有消极的影响，而且这种影响因背景而异。我们讨论了进行队列研究来检验这种关系的必要性。