Description

FPKNONAT indicates whether the woman knew about natural family planning (based on checking temperature or vaginal mucus) as a method to delay or avoid a pregnancy. The complementary variable FPEVUSNAT indicates whether the woman had ever used natural family planning.

Some samples differentiate between spontaneous and probed affirmative responses; see Comparability.

Comparability

Apart from slight variation in how this contraceptive method was labelled and described, FPKNONAT is largely comparable across samples.

IPUMS-DHS users are encouraged to review the Survey Text tab for the exact question wording for samples of interest.

In most samples, the woman is first asked to list known methods of contraception in an open-ended question, and then is probed with descriptions of the methods not spontaneously mentioned. The other samples use only yes/no questions describing each contraceptive method. Because not all samples distinguish between spontaneous and probed affirmative responses, IPUMS-DHS uses composite coding, with all affirmative responses sharing a first digit of "1," and with the second digit distinguishing between "yes, spontaneously" (code "11") and "yes, probed" (code "12").

Comparability - Standard DHS

Starting in Phase 4, the response set reduced to two response categories ("yes" and "no"), eliminating the distinction between spontaneous and probed affirmative responses. In Phase 6, only the probing question is provided in the survey form, and the open-ended question is dropped.

Although questions on whether the woman knew of a given contraceptive method are included in the standard DHS questionnaire for Phase 1 forward, FPKNONAT is a country-specific response category that is not included in any of the standard DHS modules.

Universe