Personal networks and the adoption of family planning in rural Korea.

This study uses network analysis to assess the effects of community level variables on individual level demographic behavior, isolating communication relationships between individuals and their effects, the justification being abundant documentation of opinion leadership on family planning (FP) adoption. The data employed was part of a pilot project to study effects of total contraceptive availability, instituted in a remote area of Korea. Baseline knowledge/attitude/practice information was included in the data. The final analysis included 5 sets of variables: the 1st were FP adoption indicators, inquiring about knowledge or use of methods and abortion experience. The 2nd variable set contained 6 sociodemographic items, e.g. age, education, marital age, found previously to be most relevant to FP adoption. The 3rd set dealt with sources of FP information, the 4th with FP communication and attitudes on an individual level. The 5th set dealt with numbers of information links with other individuals, direction of the links, and respondents' integrativeness. 6 additional network measures studied division into groups according to constructions of the NEGOPY computer program. A multiple regression analysis then examined variable groups to determine to what extent network measures contributed to the explanation of variance (relative to the other 6 sets of variables) in 6 indicators of family planning adoption. The net contribution of 13 network measures was substantial, with 5 showing the better part of the contribution