A smiling ASHA
Research design: Mobile Kunji Usage and Engagement Study
Fieldwork for the study was carried out by conducted by Indian Market Research Bureau between August 2014 and December 2014.
Research objectives
• To explore the effect of exposure to Mobile Kunji on key determinants of behaviour change, such as knowledge, attitudes, self-efficacy and interpersonal communication among the community members.
• To attempt to capture and validate the practice of simple doable actions directly related to Mobile Kunji messages.
Research design and methodology
The study used a mixed methods design to gather quantitative and qualitative data from a randomly selected sample of the project’s target audience and the Community Health Workers who used Mobile Kunji to communicate with them.
The quantitative component was comprised of a survey among Community Health Workers (CHWs), currently pregnant women and mothers of children 6-11 months old. A sample comprised of 583 FLWs and 3379 women from communities (2423 exposed and 956 unexposed) were surveyed.
The qualitative component included in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with the CHWs, currently pregnant women, mothers of children 6-11 months old and mother-in-laws of currently pregnant women/mothers of children 6-11 months old.
- Community Health Workers: 28 in-depth interviews and four focus group discussions with low and high Mobile Kunji users across four districts were conducted.
- 16 mini-group discussions were conducted with currently pregnant women and mothers of children 6-11 months old.
- 18 mini-group discussions were conducted with mothers-in-law of currently pregnant women and mothers of children 6-11 months old.
- Validation of quantitative study findings and quality control processes were followed.
- IMRB International was commissioned to gather, process and analyse data for the study. Their role involved designing the questionnaires, hiring and training field interviewers, monitoring and supervising their work on day to day basis, scrutinising the completed questionnaires, data entry, data cleaning, running descriptive statistics and collaborating on data analysis.
- BBC Media Action’s research team in India carried out field visits and held feedback sessions to monitor and keep tabs on the progress of the fieldwork and data entry process.
- BBC Media Action’s research and learning team in London: experts in London reviewed data for consistency and logical checks; weighting formulae and analysis syntax; outputs indicators; regression results and significance; and presentations of major findings.
- Validation of the analysis conducted by BBC Media Action was done by IMRB: All the sampling, analysis and weighting conducted by the BBC Media Action team was run again by IMRB. The outputs were then tallied in order to check for errors or inconsistencies.
Independent review of the analysis and findings was done by Evalueserve: At the recommendation of the Bill and Melida Gates Foundation (BMGF), the donor, all the outputs related to the study including the questionnaire, dataset, sampling sheet, weighing sheet, analysis syntax, analysis outputs and presentation were critically reviewed by independent research analytics agency Evalueserve. The agency provided feedback to BBC Media Action about incorporating explanations and making minor modifications and submitted the final report to BMGF which validated the study processes and results.