Childbearing Intentions and Family Planning Game

Elena Bertozzi of Quinnipiac University and Aparna Sridhar from UCLA School of Medicine in the U.S. will design a game-like tool to identify cultural norms that influence future family planning decisions in adolescent school children in Karnataka, India, to help improve contraceptive education. The majority of these children have access to technologies such as the Internet and cell phones. They will exploit this by developing a game where users create their ideal virtual family by selecting the numbers and spacing of the children, and the age they would like to have their first child. The game then challenges them to identify the resources they would need to create such a family, particularly family planning measures. This approach will teach students about family planning, and generate anonymized data on their choices and behavior in the game. The game will be developed following discussions with the target group and pilot tested on 150 students from different rural and urban schools.