It's Time to Get Practical: A Call for Shorter Measures in the Family Planning Community

While there is widespread agreement that measurement is an essential component of successful family planning programming, policy-making, and research, current measures are still catching up to the field's shift to more person-centered and agency-focused goals. Concurrently, the global reproductive health and data ecosystems have been profoundly interrupted, and resources are becoming increasingly scarce. This is thus a critical time to reexamine our priorities regarding what and how we measure across different aspects of family planning. In the last decade, new family planning measures had an average of 14 items per measure. This length is impractical for inclusion in most large-scale surveys and unfeasible in many modalities of data collection. In order to meet the very difficult moment in which the family planning community now finds itself, we must embrace pragmatism and promote the development, testing, and use of reliable, valid, and short (five or fewer item) measures. We have a chance to be both responsive and adaptive, and it is timely and necessary that we do so as a family planning measurement community.