br Conclusions br Conflict of interest br Acknowledgements T

Conclusions
Conflict of interest
Acknowledgements: This work was funded by FORTE (Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare; Grant numbers 2013-1269 and 2012-0979), and the Medical Faculty at Lund University. These institutions had no involvement regarding the collection, analysis or interpretation of data; in the writing of the article; nor in the decision to submit it for publication.
Introduction Bangladesh, a South Asian country with resource-scarcity and high hiv protease inhibitor density, has made considerable progress in social and health outcomes and in economic improvement in recent decades. The country is on track to achieve most of the MDGs (Arifeen et al., 2014; Dhaka Tribune, September 8, 2014). Literacy has improved, especially among women; there are signs of steady but consistent decline in poverty; infant and child mortality and maternal mortality have reduced significantly; and the total fertility rate has reached nearly replacement level at 2.3 births per woman during 2012–2014 (NIPORT et al., 2016). Although Bangladesh has made significant social, economic, and health progress in recent decades, much progress remains to be made in the area of reproductive health. Despite recent declines, the maternal mortality rate in 2010 was 194 deaths per 100,000 live births (NIPORT et al., 2012). The idea that a pregnant woman should have antenatal check-ups with a medically trained provider, should deliver at a health facility, or should have a post-natal check-up, is new, especially in rural areas where over 70% of people live. Delivering a child at home has been the norm in the recent past; in the early 2000s, less than 10% of deliveries took place at facilities (Streatfield et al., 2002). In the same period, only about 33% of pregnant mothers received antenatal care from medically trained providers (NIPORT et al., 2004). Fertility norms have been changing over a longer period, associated in part with a strong family planning program. In the early 1980s, about 55% of two-child mothers wanted to have additional children (Mitra et al., 1983). In 2014, only about 21% of two-child mothers want to have additional children; however 25 percent of recent births were reported to be mistimed or unwanted (NIPORT et al., 2016). TV owning and watching has grown rapidly in Bangladesh in the last 25 years. In the early 1990s only 7% of households owned a TV and less than 18% of women aged 15–49 watched TV (Mitra et al., 1994). Recently, possession of TV and watching TV has reached over 40% and 50%, respectively (NIPORT et al., 2013, 2016). TV watching is markedly more common in urban than rural areas (80% vs. 40%). In sensory neurons context of rapid expansion of access to mass media, low use of modern health care, and largely traditional lifestyles, there is marked potential for mass media, especially TV, to act as a health behavior change catalyst. The effect of health awareness-raising programs on health behavior is fairly well established (Wakefield, Laken, & Hornik, 2010), but we argue that TV watching for entertainment can have an independent influence on reproductive health behavior through the mechanisms of observational learning and information processing.
Conceptual framework
TV programs in Bangladesh
Objective of this study In this paper, we examine the association between women’s TV watching and their reproductive health behavior in Bangladesh using data from two national surveys. We hypothesize that fertility is lower and use of reproductive healthcare is higher among TV watchers than non-watchers. Prior research has explored the effect of exposure to specific behavior change media programs on reproductive health outcomes in Bangladesh (Hutchinson et al., 2006; Rahman et al., 2007; Rabbi, 2012) but studies have not focused on the association of general TV exposure with these outcomes in the country. We examine the association between TV watching and five reproductive health outcomes: 1) ideal family size, 2) current contraceptive use, 3) births in the 24 months preceding the survey, 4) four or more antenatal care (ANC) visits, and 5) delivery of recent births with a skilled birth attendant (SBA).