Interaction between clients and grass-root family planning workers in Korea: implications for program performance.

The main purpose of this study is to assess the effects of the interaction patterns between family planning workers and potential clients upon acceptance of family planning. The study was carried out as part of an intercountry collaborative study and guided by UN-ESCAP in 1991. For data collection, a random sampling procedure was applied in picking up the final units of areas (9 "dongs" in Choonchon city, 1 county in Kyeonggi Province, and 2 counties in Kangwon Province, Korea). 1383 married eligible women and 66 family planning workers in these areas were interviewed. Among the survey respondents, 75.3% were currently practicing family planning (77.7% in urban and 72.1% in rural areas), and only 19.2% of the urban respondents and 45.8% of the rural respondents had ever been exposed to a family planning worker; those who had met a worker within the 3 current months comprised 3.1% among the urban dweller and 22.9% among those in rural areas. The focal point of this study was to review the correlation between the interaction of clients and grass-root family planning workers, and the adoption of family planning practices. Family planning practice as a dependent variable was applied to tabulate multiple regression analysis in order to explain the power of the variables including interaction-related factors. The variables appearing to explain the nonadoption of family planning at a highly significant level were: 1) time and distance to service institutions, 2) friendliness of service institutions, 3) frequency of meetings with a family planning workers, 4) support of friends, 5) visits to friends, 6) wife's occupation, 7) number of living sons, 8) number of living daughters, and 9) friendliness of family planning workers. The study suggested that the training programs for field workers should be strengthened to provide a greater proportion of special sessions in the curriculum to develop the human interaction skills of workers in helping clients to identify their own problems and solve them.