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Wednesday 15 February 2017

When help hurts

by Marium Ibrahim

Sculpture by David Shrigley, contrasting the two reactions to help.
Photo credit: Pinterest

Help is a notion that many of us take for granted. You ask for help when you cannot do something yourself. But is help always a good thing? What is its relationship to identity, agency and power?

Wednesday 1 February 2017

The hurdle of hesitance

by Azmat Budhani

People's fear of health related interventions is not new. Spoof by British satirist James Gillroy depicting people's fear of small pox vaccines, 1802
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

As a researcher, I have often dealt with non-responses or respondent hesitancy in fieldwork. Earlier, I used to think that this hesitancy can only be minimized by building personal rapport through multiple visits. Over the years though, I have come to appreciate the role survey design plays in participant engagement. Our LANSA study, for example, seeks to investigate the impacts of women’s agricultural work on their own and their children’s nutrition levels. For this survey, we took the mother of an infant as the key respondent. Placing her instead of the head of household (who in most cases are male breadwinners for the family) on the top of the household roster had important implications for our fieldwork, as discussed in an earlier blog. Despite the process of anthropometric measurement being fairly clinical, or even intrusive, we found a majority of mothers eager to cooperate. They were keen to provide any information that could potentially benefit the health and future well-being of their children. Women tried to navigate constraints put by male community leaders and heads of households. One mother, for example said, ‘’My husband works in the Pakistan Army. He does not like NGOs. However, I am willing to participate.”