The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA

Abstract #72327

Pamela L. Bolton, MHS, Francophone Africa Program, Family Care International, 588 Broadway, Suite 503, New York, NY 10012, (212) 941-5300, pbolton@familycareintl.org, Michelle Trombley, BA, Skilled Care Initiative, Family Care International, 588 Broadway, Suite 503, New York, NY 10012, and Ellen Brazier, MIA, Anglophone Africa Program, Family Care International, 508 Broadway, Suite 503, New York, NY 10025.

As part of a three-country study to explore attitudes and behaviors related to childbirth and to families’ care seeking behaviors in rural African communities, we borrowed two methods from other domains of marketing and social science research: the projective interview and the first-person narrative. Twenty-five projective interviews were conducted with groups of women of reproductive age and groups of elder females in a rural African setting. Projective interviewing presents respondents with images of ambiguous or incomplete situations and lets them discuss their own interpretations of what they see. By allowing respondents to talk about “other” people, projective interviewing may elicit more genuine responses than conventional focus groups. Researchers prepared an interview guide and hired local artists to draw illustrations depicting people seeking health services. Images showed couples and prenatal clients of different ages and socioeconomic situations, various cadres of health workers, women delivering in different settings, and a postpartum woman after a normal delivery. Interview questions explored how the respondents viewed the images and how the people in those scenes would behave, feel and be treated. With the complications narrative (n=24), women who had experienced a serious obstetrical complication, their husbands and in-laws/influential elders were each guided through a detailed recounting of how they had perceived and reacted to the situation, individually and jointly—from recognizing there was a problem, to deciding to seek care, to seeking and obtaining care. The presentation describes key results, summarizes lessons learned and suggests other uses of these techniques for reproductive health behavioral research.

Learning Objectives:

• Define advantages of the projective interview technique as applied to the study of maternity care seeking behaviors in underserved developing country settings.
• Define advantages of the complications narrative technique as a means to explore families’ experience of, and responses to, obstetric complications.
• Identify other research applications for these techniques.

Keywords: Behavioral Research, Maternal Health

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.