Abstract

The study investigated Religious Beliefs and Contraceptive Use Among Married Persons in Ogun State, Nigeria. The study examined the influence of variables of Religion, gender and number of children on the perception of the respondents. The descriptive survey research design was adopted for the study. A total of 600 participants were selected through the use of purposive, proportional and stratified sampling techniques. The instrument used to collect the required information was a questionnaire entitled “Religious Beliefs and Contraceptive Use Questionnaire (RBCUQ)”. The reliability coefficient of the instrument was 0.80, which was obtained through the test-retest method. One research question and three null hypotheses were raised to guide the conduct of the study. The results revealed that religion promote contraceptive use, Men and women in religious community share the same views on contraception and religious leader influenced decisions about contraception. The hypotheses were tested using the t-test and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) statistics at a 0.05 level of significance. The result showed that there was no significant difference in Religious Beliefs and Contraceptive Use Among Married Persons in Ogun State, Nigeria, based on Religion and the result also showed that there was a significant difference in Religious Beliefs and Contraceptive Use Among Married Persons in Ogun State, Nigeria based on gender and number of children. Based on the findings of the study, it was recommended that marriage counsellors and religious leaders should make considerate and beneficial decisions on how to manage their family size through the use of contraceptives, irrespective of their religious belief.