Reviewer's report
Title:Demand for long acting and permanent contraceptive methods and
associated factors among married women of reproductive age group in Debre
Markos Town, North West Ethiopia.
Version: 2Date:24 May 2013
Reviewer: Tarek Shokeir
Reviewer's report:
Advice on publication: Accept after major compulsory revisions.
This paper describes a cross sectional community-based survey trying to assess
Demand and factors associated with utilization of long acting and permanent
contraceptive methods (LAMP) among married women of reproductive age group
in Debre Markos town, North West, Ethiopia.
General Comments:
Our major concern is that how did the authors calculate the sample size?.
According to Planning and Programming Department, Ministry of Health of
Ethiopia (Addis Ababa,2007), the reported expected prevalence of modern
contraceptive use in Amhara reigon is (0.16). In a similar study conducted by
Alemayeha M et al. in a more or less the same socio cultural, geographical and
study settings and published recently (BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, 2012) in
Mekelle town, Tigray reigon with total population of the area of 119,800 females
a sample size of 460 married women of reproductive age was participated in the
study with the assumption of 95% confidence interval, margin of error of 5% and
10% non-response rate. Compared with Debre Markos town with a total number
of women in the reproductive age group of 14,618 (Ethiopian Demographic and
Health Survey 2011. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: 2011. Accessed on December 11,
2011. Central Statistical Agency), the calculated final sample size of 523 married
women as proposed by the authors seems to be too much. Please clarify this
important point in your revised version.
Specific Comments:
1.Introduction, last paragraph: What did the authors mean by "Millennium
development goals (MDGs)?. Please re-write this paragraph in a way that
highlights these goals so that the aim of the study must be addressed clearly in
relation to the community-based study area (Debre Markos). An informative and
appropriate reference would be greatly appreciated.
2.Methods: Please provide more meaningfull sub-headings as appropriate
including: study area and setting, sampling, data collection, measurements, data
analysis, and ethical considerations.
3.Results, paragraph 2: Please comment on the average age at marriage,
average age at delivery, mean number of pregnancies, mean number of
abortions, and mean number of ectopic pregnancies.
4.Figures: Data could be interpreted in the text and figures can be omitted.
Figures are not absolutely essential in the revised version, but could usefully be
included in the online-only version of the journal as advised by the Editor.
5.No interpretation was given for figure 4.
6.Abbreviations must be defined in the text as appropriate e.g MDGs, EDHS
2011, NGOs, SNNPR…etc.
7.All numbers mentioned in the text are better to be expressed in mathematical
rather than alphabetical forms.
Level of interest: An article whose findings are important to those with closely
related research interests
Quality of written English: Needs some language corrections before being
published
Statistical review: No, the manuscript does not need to be seen by a
statistician.
Declaration of competing interests:
None declared.