On condoms in Kenya.

Kenya

 Are condom advertisements targeting widowed Kenyan women?

I recently used the Kenya Demographic Health Survey (a nationally representative data set) and ran some numbers to see how condom marketing influences use amongst women. The findings were pretty bizarre. I was just interested to see if condom marketing actually translates in to condom use. As I was finishing up my study the Kenyan government put out this interesting condom commercial that was censored almost immediately.

Here’s what I found: 

Women, who are widowed, divorced, or not living with their partner and who were exposed to condom messaging in magazines had significantly greater odds of using condoms as a current form of contraception. Exposure to condom advertising on the radio, T.V, and billboards had no significant effects. This study uses a sub-sample of 4 155 Kenyan women who have been sexually active in the past four weeks. Don’t take this at face value though, have a read through my data, definition, and methods (and because this is super academicy, since I wrote it for university, skip to the tables and jump to “explanation of the numbers” : p ).

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