1,720,957 research outputs found
"Time of the Month": A mixed-method study to understand and improve Menstrual Health and Hygiene Management in Rural North India
No full textBackground: Menstruation is a naturally occurring monthly phenomena which affects adolescent girls and women worldwide. The last decade has highlighted how menstrual hygiene management (MHM) is a public health issue because of its link to health, social justice and human rights. Menstruation is considered a taboo topic, related to uncleanliness and impurity around the world. Menstruation related restrictions have shown to increase poor hygiene behaviors, nutritional deficiencies, gender inequality, marginalization and isolation. A Social and Behavioral Change Communication (SBCC) intervention called GARIMA was implemented in three districts of Uttar Pradesh, India to improve adequate menstrual behaviors. Therefore, the overarching question of this dissertation asked: Is SBCC an effective approach to improve adequate menstrual behaviors among adolescent girls in rural North India? To answer the overarching question, three research questions were asked: 1) what are the psychometric properties of a menstrual hygiene management scale? 2) What is the relationship between menstrual related restrictions and menstrual health and hygiene management (MHHM)? 3) How does a social and behavioral change communication intervention predict MHHM? Methods: A mixed method approach was used to analyze the overarching question. Interviewer-administered structured questionnaires were completed on tablets to understand MHHM among 2212 adolescent girls in three districts of Uttar Pradesh, India. A total of 36 Focus Group Discussions were conducted with 309 adolescent girls in the three districts. Villages and adolescent girls were matched on socio-demographic and socio-economic characteristics in the intervention and comparison sites. Results: MHHM is a multi-dimensional construct comprising of behaviors which are time bound to menstruation (menstrual health) and behaviors which not time bound to menstruation (hygiene management). Drawing from existing conceptual definitions and their operationalization in this research the author defines MHHM as “Access and use of private toilet/bathroom with soap and water to wash hands and have a bath during menstruation and use of clean menstrual management material to absorb or collect blood that is stored in a safe, clean place and changed at least three times a day for the duration of the menstruation period, and accessing facilities to ultimately dispose of used menstrual management materials”. Overall, 27.58% of the adolescent girls practiced all adequate MHHM behaviors. Ninety six percent of adolescent girls stated they faced restrictions during menstruation. In general, not having restrictions had a positive relationship with adequate MHHM behaviors. The results from the evaluation showed that higher encoded exposure (dose and recall of the program) had a direct relationship with adequate MHHM. The evaluation also showed that indirectly, higher encoded exposure predicted higher knowledge about puberty, higher knowledge about reproductive parts, positive attitudes towards gender, better interpersonal communication, and thereafter, adequate MHHM. Conclusions: MHHM is a public health issue which cross-cuts through several sustainable development goals. Findings demonstrated that MHM is a multi-dimensional construct with four independent indicators corresponding to menstrual health (preparation of clean absorbent, storage of clean absorbent, frequency of changing and disposal) and one indicator corresponding to hygiene management. Therefore, the author recommends future research should use the acronym, MHHM. Restrictions were ubiquitous and mostly had a negative relationship with adequate preparation of clean absorbent, adequate storage of clean absorbent, adequate frequency of changing and disposal. A SBCC program directly improved MHHM and indirectly improved knowledge, some attitudes, interpersonal communication and therefore, adequate MHHM. These findings can be used in developing future programs and strengthening future research on MHHM.Dr.P.H., Community Health and Prevention -- Drexel University, 201
Impact of interpersonal and community level indicators on menstrual health and hygiene management among adolescent girls in rural India: A methodological analysis of behavioral monitoring tools
Get PDFUnited Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) India is currently implementing “A Communication Framework: Menstrual Management” in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Jharkhand, India. Behavioral monitoring of the communication framework allowed for the use of innovative community-based participatory monitoring tools to measure individual and community-level menstrual health and hygiene knowledge, attitude, and behavior change in villages receiving the menstrual management communication campaign. Behavioral monitoring tools were tailored for six populations, including adolescent girls, peer educators, mothers, fathers, frontline workers, and field facilitators. Mixed method approaches were used to analyze two innovative tools to assess their strengths and weaknesses while exploring social networks of adolescent girls and perceived social norms among respondent groups. Two manuscripts were developed to disseminate study findings: 1) Don’t let a period end a sentence, let it start a conversation! A Mixed Method Approach to Exploring Adolescent Girls’ Social Networks and Menstrual Health in Rural India and 2) “Today’s girls don’t believe old ideas”: The relationship between approval and menstrual health behaviors among adolescent girls in rural India.M.P.H., Community Health and Prevention -- Drexel University, 201
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
New Directions for Entertainment-Education: Results from a Mixed Methods Study Investigating the Role of Narrative Persuasion and Social Norms from a Radio Program for Individual and Social Change in Mozambique
Get PDFEncoded exposure, narrative persuasion and social norms are part of the most recent theorizing behind the health communication strategy known as entertainment-education. While much of the latest theoretical progress has taken place at academic settings in the Global North, the majority of entertainment-education continues to be practiced in the Global South. There is a paucity of theoretical tests in the entertainment-education literature from practice settings in the developing world. This study used survey and focus group data from the endline evaluation of Ouro Negro (English translation: Black Gold), an entertainment-education radio program in Mozambique designed around 14 public health topics, to answer two research questions: 1) What is the relationship between encoded exposure to entertainment-education and narrative persuasion?, and 2) What is the relationship between narrative persuasion and social norms? The study used data from the two arms of the evaluation: a survey arm, which utilized a population-based single pre and post design, and a focus group arm, which utilized a cross-sectional research design. The study included data collected from 1,910 women age 15-34 across five provinces and 20 districts who responded to the survey and 128 women age 15-34 in the same provinces and districts who participated in focus group discussions. Quantitative analysis used to answer the questions included factor and reliability analysis, regression techniques, and propensity score matching, while qualitative analysis included manual coding led by grounded theory. The results of the first research question indicated exposure to entertainment-education significantly predicted all narrative persuasion constructs, even after controlling for background variables, and that nearly all of the focus groups exhibited at least one response related to narrative persuasion. The results of the second research question indicated narrative persuasion did not significantly predict social norms constructs, and that behaviors related to program topics were not normative in the direction promoted by the radio drama. The results indicate three concrete calls to action for the field of EE moving forward: a call for marrying theory and practice across geographic settings, a call for utilizing measurement tools with populations outside of the United States, and a renewed call for commitment across sectors. Whether scholars, practitioners, and partners see these as challenges, or as exciting new opportunities, the results of this study indicate there are indeed new directions for the study and practice of entertainment-education.Dr.P.H., Community Health and Prevention -- Drexel University, 201
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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