Women’s empowerment, sociocultural contexts, and reproductive behaviour in Nepal

While demography is an inherently spatial science, most practicing demographers have not been encouraged to think spatially, even though demographic behaviour will differ by geographic region (Weeks, 2004). The incorporation of geocodes in large-scale demographic surveys provides new opportunities for research on geographic patterns of behaviour, including reproductive behaviour. In this paper, the authors assume that a woman’s reproductive behaviour takes place in sociocultural contexts, and specifically, authors explore whether the sociocultural context of women’s empowerment is important in shaping her behaviour. Using data on 1,594 Nepalese married women from the 1996 Nepal Living Standards Survey (NLSS), the specific issues explored are whether sociocultural context matters for a woman’s use of prenatal care and assistance during delivery. To date, no nationally representative study of Nepal had explicitly incorporated district-level contextual data, linked those data with individual-level responses, and then used multivariate hierarchical methods for analysis.