Original ArticlesReading skills and family planning knowledge and practices in a low-income managed-care population
Section snippets
Materials and methods
Women from 13 through 45 years of age enrolled in Prudential HealthCare Community Plan as of March 1, 1996, were eligible to participate in the study. From the list of 2197 age-eligible women, we randomly selected individuals until we completed 500 surveys. Extensive efforts were made to locate women with missing phone numbers. If a phone number was missing or incorrect from the enrollment records, the project coordinator and interviewers used several other sources to obtain a telephone number:
Results
Overall, 9.6% of the respondents were classified as having low reading skills (less than 80% correct) (Table 1). The majority of TennCare enrolled women who completed the in-person interview were at least 25 years of age, black, single, high school educated, employed (full or part-time), and poor (Table 2). Only education was related to reading skill level with 15.4% of women with a high school education or less having low reading skills compared with 3.5% of women with more than a high school
Discussion
Almost 10% of the respondents in this study had low reading skills, which is about what we would expect in a low-income population for this age group.1 The rate of contraceptive use in this population was low, and women who had ever used an intrauterine device, douching, rhythm, or levonorgestrel had higher rates of low reading skills than did women who used other methods of birth control. Compared with women with good reading skills, women with low reading skills were more likely to want to
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