Perceived Causes of Infertility and Health Care Seeking Behaviour of Women of Child-Bearing-Age in North-Eastern Nigeria

This paper designed to investigate the perceived causes of infertility and health care seeking behaviour of women of child-bearing-age in North-Eastern Nigeria. Infertility is viewed as the condition in which matured male and female partners could not achieve pregnancy after regular unprotected sexual intercourse for at least one year. It is now believed that some forms of women’s infertilities are curable. There is significant health implications involved in wrong perceptions of the causes of infertility as it may hinder one from taking appropriate health seeking, thus, the benefits involved in prompt good health seeking behaviour would not be obtained. Research question and hypothesis were formulated to guide the study. Descriptive survey research design was adopted in the study. The population of the study consist of the entire childbearing women in North-eastern Nigeria. Multi-stage sampling of simple, purposive and systematic sampling techniques were used to select the sample of 384 respondents and are sufficiently enough for the study at 0.05 alpha level. The instrument for data collection in this study was researcher-developed questionnaire base on 5 points likert scale. It was concluded that there is no significant difference in birth order of women of child-bearing age in the perceive causes of infertility and health-care seeking behaviour in North-eastern Nigeria. It was recommended among others that advocacy on causes of infertility should be done to enlighten women of child bearing age in North-eastern Nigeria and health care services should be made affordable and accessible in nooks and the cranny of the region to improve healthcare seeking behaviour of the barren women regardless of their socio-economic status.