The State of Person-Centered Measurement for Family Planning Need and Use: A Scoping Review

Standard measures used to assess family planning (FP) program success, including unmet need and demand satisfied, fail to capture women's, men's, couples', and adolescents' own expressed preferences, needs, wants, and desires. Identification is needed of person-centered fertility and FP measures that assess what individuals want, desire, need, and prefer without a researcher-ascribed value of what is the right outcome. This scoping review examines how the concept of person-centeredness has been employed as part of population-based FP measurement. For this review, we defined measures as person-centered if they assess directly a person's preferences, wants, and desires while at the same time assessing if the person can or wants to meet those preferences, wants, and desires. The review finds several studies that use or adapt standard measures of intention to use contraception and unmet need; however, a smaller number develop novel approaches that capture method preferences and satisfaction with methods to better capture individuals' needs, wants, and desires as well as their ability to attain these needs, wants, and desires. Results are used to make recommendations going forward for the design and testing of improved person-centered FP measurement at the global, national, and programmatic levels.