| dc.description.abstract | In the last 30 years considerable attention has been focused on the domain of family planning. Among those involved in such an endeavor are social psychologists who have persisted in the thesis that family planning behavior is related to attitude. However, over the past few years researchers have become acutely aware of the inconsistencies between reported attitudes and behavior (Fishbein, 1967; Tittle & Hill, 1967; Wicker, 1971). Wicker (1971) suggested that the weak relationship between verbal opinions and behavior was due to the influence on behavior of factors such as social norms, habits, and personality. Such a contention led to the design of the present study in which it was hypothesized that attendance behavior of women enrolled in a family planning clinic was a function of six variables: attitude toward the act, normative beliefs, observed past behavior, behavioral intentions, and the influence of two sets of extraneous events, those that facilitate and those that inhibit the behavior of attending a family planning clinic. The subjects for the study were women who attended a family planning clinic at a county hospital for the first time during October and November of 1973. Interviews were conducted in each woman's home at a prearranged time. The questionnaire that she was asked to complete consisted of items representing all the predictors except past behavior which was obtained from clinic records. Of the 293 attempted interviews, 166 were completed and included in data analysis. The central consideration of the present study was to see if women who returned to the clinic for the annual appointment had different responses from those who failed to return to the clinic. The function obtained in a discriminant analysis of these two groups was significant, X^2 (6) = 72.633, p < .001. Three variables - past behavior, inhibiting events, and behavioral intentions - showed statistically significant discriminative capabilities. The means of all six variables for the "kept annual appointment" group were more positive than for the "missed annual appointment" group. A stepwise multiple regression analysis which included the six variables accounted for a significant proportion of the criteria variance indicating that they could predict behavior. Past behavior, inhibiting' events, behavioral intentions, and normative beliefs explained about 35 percent of the variance. The last two variables - attitude toward the act and facilitating events - together accounted for an additional one percent of the variance. Consistent with most other studies (cf. Wicker, 1969), the present study found that attitude was a poor predictor of behavior. Ostrom (1969) suggested that attitude would not contribute to the prediction of behavior if the attitude object were noncontroversial or if the population were homogeneous. Thus, contrary to the suggestions of some researchers (eg., Kothandapani, 1971), the area of family planning may not be particularly controversial for some populations. A second explanation might be that the women in the sample did not have well-developed attitudes toward attending the clinic. Thus, the attitude-behavior relationship would be weak, and other variables would be necessary for better prediction (Converse, 1970; Sample & Warland, 1973). Certainly, a final decision as to the predictive capability of attitude is beyond any one study. However, that attitude did not have a significant correlation with the overt act did suggest that researchers should concentrate on the exploration of the behavior of interest and on the potentially influencing nonattitudinal variables. Furthermore, future research is needed to investigate the ability of the variables delineated in the present study in predicting other types of behavior. | |
