THE IMPACT OF THE QUALITY OF FAMILY-PLANNING-SERVICES ON CONTRACEPTIVE USE IN PERU

Through linkage of a Demographic and Health Survey to a situation anal ysis, this article explores whether current contraceptive use in Peru is affected by the service environment in which a woman resides. The i nvestigation focuses explicitly on the impact of the quality of family planning services and finds that, net of personal and household chara cteristics, a significant, albeit small, effect exists for one specifi cation of quality in the total sample and for the other specification a nearly significant (p=.053) effect exists. The analysis reveals that contraceptive prevalence would be 16 to 23 percent greater if all wom en lived in a cluster with the highest quality of care compared with t he lowest. Methodological problems that arise in measuring quality of care at the cluster level and in linking qualify to individual contrac eptive use are also addressed.