Knowledge and Usage of Contraceptives, Influencing Male Reproductive Health Behavior

Introduction: In Pakistan, male involvement in reproductive health started long before the concept of a holistic approach emerged from ICPD in 1994. Men are far behind the knowledge about contraceptives, authority of decisions making, religiosity, and exposure of media, health attitude, physical cost, Knowledge of HIV/STDs, drugs and family planning services. These circumstances have damaging-effect on men's reproductive health as well. The poor reproductive health of men in the entire Pakistan has been reported in many studies. The different national and international agencies have shown a great concern on this alarming situation of men's deteriorating reproductive health status. They have recommended investigating the men reproductive health status in relation to different aspects. In this context the main objectives of this study is to identify and analyze different types of socio-cultural characteristics, affect the attitudes, lack of awareness of respondents toward reproductive health behavior were examined in Punjab-Pakistan. Methodology: A cross sectional study was conducted in 3-districts of Punjab province. In this way the total sample size will be 600, 300 from rural and 300 from urban areas. A well-structured questionnaire consisting of open ended and close ended questions has been prepared in the light of research objectives. Pre-testing was also in the study plan to examine the work-ability of questionnaire and to know the sensitive issues which can be tackled intelligently. Results: Bi-variate and multivariate analyses were used to explore the relationship between different terms MRHB. The results regarding age, discussion about reproductive health problems, general health status, Knowledge about Contraceptive, Contraceptive use behavior of the respondents and their reproductive health behavior were having their strong relationship and communication of affairs with wife having no relation and in multivariate analysis were used to build model and respondents age at marriage were highly significant and age of the respondent, communication of affairs, ideal number of children in a family were non-significant with MRHB.. The value of adjusting R2 is 0.660 and it indicates that about 66% variation in the dependent variable is explained by knowledge about contraceptive and use of contraceptive.