Engaging select cohorts on identified themes of health through technology led communication

Introduction

On the basis the outcomes of the diagnostic study, a multi-pilot technology driven study has been designed for select cohorts of Rajasthan on validated themes. We proposed the study in the Ethics Committee Board of IIT Delhi and AIIMS and we obtained its approval. Ten villages each in two sub districts of Tonk, Rajasthan have been selected as treatment and control groups. The public is being exposed to health related communication which is being evaluated at an immediate and impact levels.

Impact Evaluation STUDY

1.Baseline Survey Instrument Design

For appraising the impact of this communication based intervention, a set of three baseline questionnaires was developed after thorough literature review.

• First one is meant for the households covering the treatment and control groups. The objective of this survey is to determine awareness and attitude of the selected sample towards women and children health related issues, health facilities, female rights, autonomy and women empowerment specific to health related issues amongst others.

• Second questionnaire is designed for adolescent school going girls. It determines the awareness of the school going female children health facilities available, menstrual hygiene and feminine health, their activism, and perception about girl child.

• The third survey is meant to assess the engagement on health issues by members of Village Health, Sanitation and Nutrition Committee (VHSNC). We intend to know the awareness among Committee members about their roles, member activism, knowledge about the health and sanitation situation in village, knowledge about their responsibility and perception about the awareness and health facilities available amongst the villagers.

2.Survey Personnel Hiring and Procurement of Resources

Volunteers were hired and trained to conduct these surveys following the guidelines from the Ethics Committee. To carry out the surveys, we procured Android based tablets, connectivity to the Internet service providers and web services. This enabled us to gather information in digital form through a designed web application on the tablets. The volunteers activities on ground were regularly monitored and data authentication was performed. Senior research officers have been stationed on ground to supervise all the activities.

3.Baseline survey execution and data collection

As per the sampling design, the volunteers have interviewed the sampled households in Rajasthan’s Todaraisingh and Uniara after taking the consent for participation. The data gathered was coded.

4.Volunteer hiring for Communication Intervention

Volunteers were hired to collect the intervention data to be collected again from the treatment and control groups.

5.Communication Intervention method

Based on the identified themes and due to less usage of technology by the female population in the selected regions, the study has been formulated to expose the randomly chosen women and children in their households to selective communication. Communication in form of videos is theme based and is mapped to the profiles of the target cohorts.

6.Personnel hiring for end line

Recruiting personnel for conducting the end line survey.

7.CONDUCTING END LINE SURVEY

In order to evaluate the project achievement an end line survey is conducted and it is compared with the base line data.

8.Data coding and analysis

Through data coding the essential features of data sets obtained from survey is summarized and conclusions were drawn using data analysis.

Communication Efficacy Measurement

• To evaluate the intermediate effect of the communication intervention, a questionnaire to assess the communication efficacy has been designed after an extensive literature review to determine the constructs of communication recall, recognition, behavioral intention and attitude through evaluative judgment, affective and cognitive responses.

• Thematic and content analyses of the communcaiton have been done for the questionnaire from the scales anchored in the literature for communication efficacy.

• This questionnaire includes seven sub questionnaires which are profile/theme centric. The questionnaire is one of its kind and can be used by researchers across the Globe to measure the efficacy of the communication campaigns in not-for-profit sector.

• Since the questionnaire was to be bilingual (in English and Hindi languages), forward and back translations in these languages was done, with cross verification by a third party.

• The final version of questionnaire in Hindi was obtained by testing the questionnaire on a similarly profiled audience.

• An integrated web based tablet application has been designed that takes consent from a participant, enquires about her profile, shows a communication based on this profile, and then runs the user through the communication efficacy questionnaire based on the communication shown.

• The bilingual application is built to expose the participants with communication with a pre-set frequency corresponding to the themes and profile category the participant fits in, and gather questionnaire responses after the exposure.

• Currently the intervention is in progress and will be followed by end-line survey by end of the year to assess its impact.