EFFECT OF VITAMINS C AND E INTAKE ON BLOOD ... - EuroJournals

International Research Journal of Finance and Economics – Volume 2, Number I (2006)
A self-developed questionnaire was administered to elicit information on demographic
characteristics of respondents, practice of FGM, reasons for the practice and attitudes toward its
continuation. To measure respondents’ attitudes to FGM, they were presented ten statements on the
practice of FGM to which they were to indicate their level of agreement on a five-point scale. Scores
in all ten items were summed up and used as the measure of respondents’ attitude to the practice of
FGM. The higher the score a respondent got, the stronger her support for the discontinuation of FGM.
The questionnaire yielded a test-retest reliability coefficient of 0.84 when tested for reliability before
use. Descriptive and inferential statistics were employed to analyze the data collected.
Results
A total of 1583 respondents participated in the study, each of whom was married and had at
least one female child within the last five years. Most respondents were between 25 and 35 years old
and had more than secondary school education. They belonged to the two dominant religions in
Nigeria: Christianity and Islam. Table 1 shows the demographic characteristics of respondents
according to age, level of education, marital status and religion.
Table 1 : Demographic Characteristics of Respondents
RESPONDENTS’ AGE CATEGORIES
VARIABLES Below 25 25 to 35 36 to 45 Above Total
Years Years Years 45 Years
Secondary
Level Of
OND/NCE
Education First Degree
Above 1 st 59 149 79 78 365
92 263 163 133 651
63 226 118 92 499
Degree 9 25 14 20 68
Marital status Single Mother 1 9 10 1 21
Married
193 584 310 299 1386
Separated
23 45 35 15 118
Divorced
6 25 19 8 58
Religion Christianity
207 608 358 303 1476
Islam
16 55 16 20 107
The results of the study on the prevalence of FGM as presented in Table 2 showed that 1384
mothers representing 87.4% of the total sample had FGM performed on them as against 199 (12.6%)
who reported that they were not genitally mutilated. The results also indicated that 79.4% of the
respondents’ daughters were genitally mutilated.
The data in Table 2 also revealed the relationship between respondents’ and their daughters’
FGM status. Out of 1384 mothers who had FGM performed on them, 1206 (87.1%) had their
daughters genitally mutilated within the last five years while only 178 (12.9%) did not. On the other
hand, of 199 mothers who did not experience FGM, 148 (74.4%) did not carry it out on their daughters
while 51 (25.6%) had the procedure performed on their daughters. These analyses yielded a chi-square
value of 402.55, which is significant at 0.05 level given one degree of freedom. This suggests that
respondents who themselves were genitally mutilated had a statistically significantly possibility of their
daughters being genitally mutilated.
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