Contraceptive Concordance

We propose an indicator of contraceptive concordance that identifies the alignment between stated preferences for contraception and concurrent contraceptive behavior. Our indicator departs from traditional approaches to measurement in family planning that infer concordance to be the alignment between women's contraceptive (non-)use and their fertility preferences. We estimate our indicator using data from a cross-sectional survey that was conducted with 1,958 married women in rural India. More than half of all women in our sample (51.2 percent) report that they are currently using a contraceptive method. More than three in five women (60.8 percent) were classified as wanting to use a contraceptive method at the time of the survey. We find that 60 percent of women in our sample are classified to be concordant (either wanted users or wanted nonusers), while almost 1 in 4 women (24.8 percent) state a preference for using contraception but are not users (unwanted nonusers), and 15.2 percent of women in our sample state a preference for not using contraception but are users (unwanted users). We discuss the comparative advantages and limitations of our approach relative to traditional measures and other recently developed indicators.