Contraceptive Switching Behavior: An Application of Multistate Life Tables

Tzy-Mey (May) Kuo, Research Triangle Institute
Helen P. Koo, Research Triangle Institute

Multistate life tables method is well suited to describe the dynamics of women's contraceptive switching behavior because it allows women to switch forward and backward among reversible contraceptive methods and it handles more than two contraceptive methods simultaneously. However, construction of multi-state life tables with event history data has not been well documented in the literature. This paper demonstrates the application of multistate life table to the study of women's contraceptive switching behavior for 24 months using event history data. The sample includes a total of 1840 women sampled from 2 family planning clinics and their month by month use of contraceptive methods was recorded. Monthly Probabilities of contraceptive switching and their standard errors were computed first. We then used these probabilities to obtain the cumulative transition probabilities. The standard errors of these cumulative probabilities were derived in the paper. The limitations of the method and future applications were discussed.