The attitudes of refugee women in Turkey towards family planning

Abstract

Objectives This study was conducted to determine refugee women's attitudes towards family planning and related factors. Design and Sample Designed in descriptive and cross‐sectional type, the study involved 555 voluntary Syrian refugee women in Turkey. Measures A questionnaire and the Family Planning Attitude Scale (FPAS) were used. Independent Sample T test, ANOVA test, and Pearson's correlation analysis were used for data analysis. Results A significant association was found between the average FPAS scores with educational status, income level, social security, use of FP methods, spousal support for FP, and training for FP in Syria. Conclusions It was determined that the attitudes of women towards family planning were at the medium level, nearly half of them used a kind of family planning and received its training, and that their attitudes towards family planning were affected by their and their husband's educational level, their income level, the availability of social security, the type of family planning, the utilization of family planning, and spousal support. Based on our study findings, refugee women and their partners/husbands should be informed on FP and their attitudes towards and the barriers against FP should be investigated by further studies.

Tools for measuring sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) indicators in humanitarian settings

“…Non-probability methods are more feasible while conducting research with some marginalized populations, especially in situations with limited resources and research capacity. However, non-probability sampling results in findings that are less representative of the population and less generalizable across settings (29, 30). Additionally, some of the non-random samples within our review were very small, further reducing their generalizability (31).…”

The knowledge, attitudes and behaviours of Syrian refugee women towards family planning: Sample of Hatay

“…In Syria, the fertility rate was reported to be 2.68 in 2014 and 2.55 in 2015 (Indexmundi, 2016), whereas in Turkey, it was stated to be 2.15 in , 2.11 in 2016and 2.07 in 2017(TSI, 2017. Studies have found that Syrian refugee women have more children after migration (Bayram Deger, Ertem, Durmuş, Cifci, & Balci, 2018) and that migration has no negative effect on their fertility (Alan Dikmen et al, 2019).…”

“…In this study, the proportion of Syrian refugee women who used some kind of FP method was 75.1%, and 47.9% used a traditional FP method. Similarly, although Karakaya et al (2017) reported that Syrian refugee women stated that the most used FP method was withdrawal (coitus interruptus), other studies have found that modern FP methods were most used (Alan Dikmen et al, 2019;Benage, Greenough, Vinck, Omeira, & Pham, 2015;Smith, 2016). For this reason, it may be said that it will be difficult to generalize the use of FP methods in refugees and that there are many factors which affect this.…”

“…According to the literature, a large number of factors may be related to a high fertility rate or inadequate levels of the use of FP methods (Çiftçi et al, 2018;Gümüş et al, 2017;Mutlu et al, 2016;Salisbury et al, 2016;West et al, 2016). Among these factors are education level, socio-economic structure (Üçler & Kızılkaya, 2014), the structure of society, culture, belief system, traditions and customs, values and social behaviour patterns (Karakaya et al, 2017;Üçler & Kızılkaya, 2014), availability and access to health services (Aydın, Korukcu, & Kabukcuoglu, 2017;Tuzcu & Ilgaz, 2015), and knowledge and attitude to pregnancy and FP (Alan Dikmen et al, 2019;Karakaya et al, 2017;Üçler & Kızılkaya, 2014;Yıldırımkaya, 2014). In this study, it was found that the rates of use of modern methods of refugee women aged 35 or more who had a high level and who knew modern methods were higher.…”

“…as age, height, weight, education level, profession, husband's profession, income, family structure, relatedness to husband, social security and length of time as a migrant and obstetric characteristics. The second part had 29 questions prepared in line with the related literature(Agcada g Çelik & Vural, 2018;Alan Dikmen, Cankaya, & Dereli, 2019;Smith, 2016;West et al, 2016) and evaluating the participants' knowledge, attitude and behaviours concerning FP.…”