Vice President Sambodhi Research and communications, India
Participatory approaches play an important role in solving complex public health issues within the realm of social science. They display commitment on the part of researchers for meaningful and sustained collaboration with relevant stakeholders. Public health rarely uses these approaches, often because of a lack of confidence in implementing them, or because funding sources dictate traditional structured approaches that are neither developed locally nor relevant to local contexts.
We believe that participatory approaches can be used to assess complex constructs such as individual, community, and institutional norms in order to develop interventions aimed at changing those norms and behaviors. We argue that such an approach would add value to these interventions, since it can engage stakeholders by demonstrating emerging evidence as well as the benefits of incorporating evidence into design, implementation, and sustainability. We will present our experience and learning related to using participatory approaches within a formative research study in order to improve respectful maternity care at public health facilities in India. We will describe the participatory approach layered within the qualitative study to assess individual norms (health service provider level) and institutional norms (public health facility level) around provision of respectful maternity care as well as how we used this approach for assessing community norms around demand for respectful maternity care. In addition, we will also describe how we plan to use follow up participatory approaches that have the potential for the effective uptake and acceptability of the intervention at various levels.
