Family planning attitudes of Methodist seminary husbands and wives

Abstract

Problem The problem of this dissertation is to discover through a pilot research project some of the family planning attitudes of Methodist seminary husbands and wives. Method Through the use of a 70-item pretested, precoded, printed, and mailed questionnaire constructed by the author, 60 couples in each of 10 of Methodism's 12 seminaries were tested. The sample was constructed so as to give every Methodist married student in all 10 seminaries an equal chance of being selected for the study. Because no comparative data existed, a smaller number of couples in 13 non-Methodist seminaries were chosen in order to provide two comparison groups, not discussed here. Two follow-up efforts. A response rate of 92.4 per cent was achieved for the 1,980 questionnaires mailed. Validity was sought through the use of experts, a Background Group, interviews, a Sentence Completion Test, and a frequency distribution. A reliability index of 96 per cent was obtained through a test-retest procedure. All data analysis was done on an IBM 1620 computer. The dissertation consists of a backgrounds chapter (Chapter II), a chapter on methodology (Chapter III), a chapter on results and interpretation (Chapter IV), a chapter on results of chi square tests (Chapter V), and a conclusions chapter (Chapter VI) [TRUNCATED]