Cultural complications in fertility interviewing

Abstract

A description is presented of interviewing and other field work problems in a fertility and KAP survey among village women in East Pakistan. The female population studied had a very low literacy rate and no previous contact with social research.In the survey described, village women were interviewed through the use of many standard questions concerning fertility and family planning. Inappropriate responses to these items were produced by the women. Many women misunderstood the questions or did not have the requisite information. This necessitated special explanations to respondents. One standard survey procedure which had to be modified in the field work was the maintenance of privacy in the interview situation.Prior to the survey (which was done in conjunction with a pilot family planning project), an attempt was made to develop a corps of indigenous village data-collectors.

Poor Quality of Data in Africa: What Are the Issues?

“…There is a wide range of reasons why conducting ethnographic and/or survey research may generate unreliable data. The unreliability of the data may be caused by problems of sampling in the developing world (Zarcovich ), by the presence of a large number/percentage of nonrespondents who, as Mitchell noted (, 226), “are typically not distributed randomly throughout the sample but differ according to variations in the cultural and social accessibility of distinct population segments; by measurement errors, by the fact that the questions may lose some of their meaning once translated, by courtesy bias, or by other cultural complications” (see also Choldin, Khan, and Ara , , 262).…”

The Limitations of Stranger-Interviewers in Rural Kenya

“…Most commonly, however, it simply peppered other local conversation about the research project. 5 All in all, these responses-and other angry ones such as "those whites, they want to know what we think and they go back and laugh" (Gwassi 1995:12)-resemble colorful examples drawn from early fertility and household surveys in Jamaica (Back and Stycos 1959), Bangladesh (Choldin, Kahn, and Ara 1967), India (Agar 1980), and elsewhere in Kenya (Kearl 1976). In these cases, too, stranger-interviewers were alternately thought to be agents of the secret service, army conscription agencies, or a compulsory population control program, or simply "godless women heralding the end of the world" (Choldin, Kahn, and Ara 1967:251).…”

“…If suspicion caused only a small minority of individuals to refuse outright to participate in the survey (actual nonresponse rates are presented in Section 4), it was largely because the project was also seen as a potential source of economic assistance or as an agent of development. Again, this general problem affects research projects in many developing countries (Belcher et al 1976;Bulmer 1993;Choldin, Kahn, and Ara 1967;Stone and Campbell 1984). In the KDICP, it manifested itself in a number of ways.…”