Multilevel Modelling of Modern Contraceptive Use among Rural and Urban Population of Ethiopia

The present data set has a two-level hierarchical structure, with over 16,700 women nested within eleven geographical regions in Ethiopia. The bivariate analysis result showed that Place of residence, Working status, exposure to media messages, educational status, and women religion had shown a significant variation. Women use of contraceptive was also considerably varied among regions in the preliminary bivariate analysis. In Ethiopia, Women desire for more children was found to be the main reason that woman’s do not practice contraceptives. Because of Our response variable is a binary indicator of whether a woman uses modern contraceptives we are restricted to model the probability of a women’s use of contraceptive with its odd. Accordingly, from the multilevel logistic regression model it was found that all the three models are found to be significant indicating that there is real multilevel variation among contraceptive users in Ethiopia. The deviance-based chi-square value is significant for multilevel random intercept model implies that in comparison to the model with multilevel random intercept and fixed slope model the multilevel random intercept and random coefficients model has a better fit. This further implied that multilevel logistic regression model is best fit over the ordinary multiple logistic regression models, further from the model fit diagnostics statistics, Deviance, AIC and BIC presented on Table 2. We can see that the model fit statistics values for random intercept are much smaller than the other multilevel models therefore the random coefficient model best fits the data in comparison with other multilevel models. From the random coefficient estimates for intercepts and the slopes vary significantly, which implies that there is a considerable variation in the effects of religion, place of residence and radio messages, these variables also found to differ significantly across the regions. The variance component for the variance of intercept in the random slope model is large compared to its standard error. Thus, there remains some regional-level variance unaccounted for in the model. Generally, this study revealed that socio-economic, demographic and proximate variables are important factors that affect contraceptives use in Ethiopia. In line with this regional differentials shows that women in more urbanized regions such as Addis Ababa, Dire Dawa, and Harari are more likely to use modern contraceptives than respondents in regions that are more rural. The effect of regional variations for religion, place of residence and radio messages further implies that there exist considerable deference in modern contraceptive use among regions and a model with a random coefficient or slope is more appropriate to explain the regional variation than a model with fixed coefficients or without random effects. As there is variation and differences in use of Modern contraceptives across regions in Ethiopia, it is recommended to balance the