Factors influencing women’s contraceptive decision-making in Albania
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Modern methods of contraception are freely available in Albania, yet contraceptive prevalence among Albanians is relatively low (11%). This study aimed to investigate potential factors that influence women’s contraceptive decision-making. Methods In 2016, we conducted a multi-method qualitative study with women and service providers in Albania. We invited women to report their contraceptive knowledge, attitudes, and practices in an online survey. Also, we conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with key informants to understand better the current reproductive health landscape in the country. Additionally, we conducted structured interviews with pharmacists in Tirana to assess their contraceptive training and provision practices. Results We collected 115 responses from women in the online survey. Nineteen key informants and sixteen pharmacists participated in interviews. Nearly half of women surveyed reported using no form of contraception in the past month, year, or lifetime. Male condoms and withdrawal were the most common methods. Key informants reported that the use of contraceptives is low due to widespread misinformation and misconceptions associated with hormonal contraceptives in particular. Also, stigma and fear of judgment influence women’s contraceptive decision-making. Two thirds of pharmacists (n = 10, 63%) reported that clients seeking contraception face barriers when accessing these services, including fear of shaming, embarrassment to discuss the need for contraception, and lack of knowledge and awareness. Due to a complex web of social and cultural ideas, all groups of participants reported that Albanians are more accepting of abortion as a method of birth control and reluctant to use modern contraceptive methods. Conclusions Misinformation, lack of awareness, and fear of judgment and embarrassment strongly influence women’s contraceptive decision-making in Albania. Key messages: Misinformation about modern methods of contraception among women and providers in Albania are common. Training of health service providers, as well as development of materials for distribution are warranted to improve contraceptive knowledge and uptake.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.034 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".