Measuring gender and reproductive health in Africa using demographic and health surveys

The need for mixed-methods research

Datos Bibliográficos

ID15099697
AutoresEnid Schatz (0000-0003-3963-2745, University of Missouri, autor de correspondencia), Jill Williams (University of the Witwatersrand)
Año2012
Volumen14
Número7
Páginas811-826
Fecha de publicación2012-08-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCulture Health & Sexuality (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1369-1058 • E-ISSN: 1464-5351
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13691058.2012.698309
PMID22800616
OpenAlexW2037982262
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas18
Referencias citadas41

Understanding gender in Africa is essential to creating policy and designing interventions to address key reproductive-health issues such as HIV/AIDS and maternal mortality that are particularly pressing for the continent and are strongly related to gender inequality. The addition of questions to capture women's empowerment and autonomy on the MEASURE/Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in the late-1990s expanded opportunities to examine the relationship between gender and reproductive health. These questions provide valuable information on trends and individual-level associations between gender inequality and health. Given that women's empowerment, status and autonomy are largely dependent on contextually-specific gender systems, however, supplementary qualitative studies to validate and contextualise these data would strengthen analyses significantly. This paper provides examples of how such mixed-methods work would improve understandings of gender and reproductive health in Africa by validating survey questions, providing insights into how to analyse and interpret DHS data and illuminating the processes and mechanisms behind gendered experiences. Additionally, this work could help improve future survey research on gender and reproductive health

Autonomy · Empowerment · Environmental health · Gender inequality · Inequality · Political science · Population · Psychological intervention · Qualitative property · Reproductive health · Sociology · Survey data collection · Demographic Trends and Gender Preferences · Gender Studies · Global Maternal and Child Health · Medicine · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare · Psychology