Son Preference and Contraceptive Use in Selected States of India Hameed P Zabeena1, Krishna P M2 1Assistant Professor and Head, Department of Economics, University of Calicut, Dr. John Matthai Centre, Thrissur, Kerala, E-mail: zabeenahp@gmail.com 2Research Assistant, Department of Economics, University of Calicut, Kerala, respectively Online Published on 09 February, 2024. Abstract This paper focuses on the imbalances in sex composition of selected states of India and examines whether preference for sons among women influences contraceptive use. Data for this study was collected from the National Family and Health Survey - 5 and focuses on the DEMARU states. Multinomial logistic regression analysis was conducted for the DEMARU states, for which the dependent variable was contraceptive use. Nine independent variables, viz, education level of the women, wealth status in quintiles, religion, social group, place of residence, the number of living children, the age group of women, sex preference for the child and mass media exposure, were considered for the analysis to evaluate whether these factors have affected the contraceptive use. The study observes that contraceptive use and the factors influencing contraception are not uniform across the states. Son preference was a major factor that impacted contraception across all the DEMARU states. Considerable variations in contraceptive use were seen across states for different variables. Interestingly, the place of residence was not a significant explanatory variable for any of the states except for Haryana. Top Keywords Son preference, Contraceptive use, DEMARU states, NFHS, Sex ratio at birth. Top |