Reviewer's report
Title:Prevalence and correlates of contraceptive use among female adolescents
in Ghana
Version:2Date:18 February 2015
Reviewer: Wendy Heywood
Reviewer's report:
This manuscript examined correlates of contraceptive use among women aged
15 to 19 years in Ghana. The manuscript did a good job describing why this topic
is important, why it is particularly important to study contraceptive use among
female adolescents in Ghana and the potential implications of the findings.
Major compulsory revisions
1. My main comment has to do with the structure of the results section. The
article would flow better if table 1 and the description of table 1 only reported on
participant characteristics (frequency and precent). Furthermore, the prevalence
data should be moved to table 2 as this is what the logistic regression examined
(i.e. if the prevalence of contraceptive use was different according to a variety of
characteristics). At the moment the information is essentially presented twice. For
example, the first paragraph of the results states “The prevalence of
contraceptive use was higher among female adolescents aged 18 to 19 (31.4%)
than female adolescents aged 15 to 17 (9.2%).” While the first paragraph under
the section Correlates of female adolescent contraceptive use states “the odds of
contraceptive use were 3.49 times higher for female adolescents aged 18 to 19
compared to female adolescents aged 15 to 17.”
2. Table 2. The confidence intervals for level of education are extremely wide.
This is due to small cell size in the reference category (Only 3.5% of women with
no education (n=87) reported contraceptive use. By my calculations only about
three women in this category reported contraceptive use.) Please consider 1)
combining no education and primary education categories or 2) changing the
reference category and not placing too much importance on the findings in
relation to no education as you don’t quite have enough data to produce a stable
estimate.
3. The manuscript would also benefit from editing and proof reading. Although
the language, in general, does not prevent the reader from understanding the
content, certain phrases are used in the wrong context, there are a few minor
spelling mistakes/errors (e.g. second paragraph of the results there is an s before
highest), the use of tense is not always consistent (e.g. in the method) and there
are some places that would benefit from tightening or removal of unnecessary
words (e.g. phrases such as Besides or In effect can be removed from the
beginning of sentences).
Minor essential revisions
Methods
4. Please include the number of women aged 15-19 years in the final sample.
5. After the sentence “The dependent (outcome) variable for the study is current
contraceptive use including both traditional and modern methods” Please include
a list of the specific types of contraception measured in this study.
6. In the final sentence of the method please change “STATA” to “Stata” and
include a citation. Please see
http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/citing-software-documentation-faqs/
Results
7. At the start of the results please include the overall prevalence of
contraceptive use in the sample of adolescent women aged 15 to 19. And if
possible include a comment about the most common type of contraceptive used
in the sample.
8. Can you please specify if the sample consisted of all women aged 15 to 19
years or only sexually active women aged 15 to 19 years? If all women are
included my guess is that those who have not had sex were coded as not using
contraception?
9. In the second sentence of the results please change aged 18 to 18 to aged 18
to 19.
Conclusions
10. A sentence in the conclusion states “Consequently, pragmatic adolescent
and reproductive health programmes can target younger female adolescents
aged 15 and below…” This study however, examined women aged 15 to 19
years. Perhaps rephrase to match what the study found.
References
11. Reference 19. Please bold the title of this article to be consistent with other
journal article references.
Tables
12. Table 2. Consider renaming table “Logistic regression of correlates of female
adolescents contraceptive use”
13. Table 2. Consider adding a table note such as “Adjusted for all other
variables in the model”.
14. Table 2. Please remove “Level of education” from the bottom of the table.
Discretionary revisions
15. Table 2. Consider rounding 95% Conf. Interval to 2 decimal places to be
consistent with the odds ratio
16. Table 2. Consider removing the p-value column as this information is already
conveyed with the asterisks next to the odds ratios.
Level of interest: An article whose findings are important to those with closely
related research interests
Quality of written English: Not suitable for publication unless extensively edited
Statistical review: Yes, and I have assessed the statistics in my report.
Declaration of competing interests:
I declare that I have no competing interests