Exploring Determinants of Health Seeking Behaviour and Perceptions of Need for Preventive Health Care among Rural and Urban Women of Shimla

This paper examines the factors that mostly affect the health seeking behaviour of rural and urban women of Shimla and their awareness, knowledge and opinion regarding the preventive health services. With the help of Chi square (²) tests the independent variables like age, marital status, education, income and occupation were analyzed for their independent predictive power on dependent variables comprising the perception of need for preventive health care and its utilization which included going/not going for voluntary health check up and reasons for non utilization of voluntary health care services in rural and urban areas. Education variable decided the perception of health needs as well as the capacity to acquire the health services (p < 0.01), thereby playing a vital role in determining the utilization pattern of health services.