EXAMINATION OF THE FACTORS AFFECTING PREGNANCY NUMBER AND PREGNANCY INTERVAL AMONG WOMEN IN ERZURUM PREGNANCY NUMBER AND PREGNANCY INTERVAL

The time between pregnancies and the number of pregnancies are important in terms of both mother and fetal and neonatal health. the highest pregnancy rate and fertility rate have been observed in eastern anatolia region in turkey. therefore, this study was conducted in order to investigate the effective factors that may be cause of these high rates. this descriptive and retrospective study was conducted in all gynecology outpatient clinics in the city center of erzurum. the population of study consisted of women who admitted to related outpatient clinics between september 2011 and march 2013 and had at least two live and term pregnancies. the study consisted of 3.668 women who met the study criteria and agreed to participate in the study applied the relevant dates. a questionnaire, which involved the women’s socio-demographic and obstetric characteristics, was used to collect the data. the data were collected by filling in the questionnaire through the face-to-face interview method. the data were evaluated by using number, percentage, mean, standard deviation, one way analysis of variance, independent samples t test and kruskal-wallis, mann-whitney u and chi square significance test. nonparametric tests were used for not normally distributed data. parametric tests were used for normally distributed data. the normal distribution of test data was used to assess homogeneity of variances with levene test.the women, who participated in the study, reported that 36.3% of the women were in the age group of 39-49 years, 65.6% were married in the age group of 13-17 years, and 40.8% stated that the ideal number of children is 2. it was found that 88.6% of the women who participated in the study, had an age at first birth between 18-35 years, 31.2% experienced totally five and more pregnancies. the average pregnancy interval of the women was found to be 33.08 ± 22.76 months. 27% of women’s pregnancies were according to their planned interval and 18.6% of the women stated that they became pregnant at the time intervals that they did not want. it was found that there was a statistically significant difference between pregnancy interval and factors such as the women's age, marriage age, age of husband, income status, duration of marriage, ideal number of children, number of living children, and total number of pregnancy (p<0.05). a statistically significant difference was determined between number of pregnancies and factors such as the women's age, educational status, working condition, and marriage age, the husband's age, educational status, working condition, and marriage age, type of family, income status, duration of marriage, ideal number of children, age at first birth, number of living children, and number of abortus, stillbirth and dead children (p<0.05).