Accessibility of Rural Women to Family Decision-Making Process

The major purposes of the study were to ascertain the accessibility of rural women to family decision-making process and to explore the relationships between the nine selected characteristics of the women with their accessibility to family decision-making. The study was conducted in two selected villages of Paba upazila under Rajshahi district. The population of the study included 698 women who were the wives of farm family heads and data were collected from a sample of 105 women selected by random sampling method using interview schedule during March to April 2011. Against the possible score range 0 to 90, the observed overall scores for rural women’s accessibility to family decision-making ranged from 21 to 81. The highest proportion (51 percent) of the rural women had medium overall accessibility to decision-making, while 26 percent had high accessibility and the rest 23 percent had low accessibility to family decision-making. The components in which the rural women had relatively high accessibility to family decision-making in descending order were: food and nutrition, health and sanitation, cloths and ornaments, family literacy, housing and social activities. The remaining three components had lesser accessibility to family decision-making. Correlation analysis indicates that education, extension contact, cosmopoliteness and family cooperation of the rural women had a significant and positive relationship with their accessibility to decision-making, while age and superstition had significant but negative relationship.