The slides that conclude this lecture look at some examples
of how some of our MPH students in Abad and Nigeria have actually
done studies to test, or operationalize these different variables.
For example,
one of the students looked at over 400 mothers who had recently given birth.
And their children had passed four months of age,
when they would have had a chance to practice exclusive breastfeeding or not.
And so, a number of questions were asked to find out if they had done it, and
then would they intend to do it with their next baby?
Questions to operationalize this for
the attitude toward exclusive breastfeeding were things like,
what do you think would be the effect of exclusive breastfeeding on yourself?
Is it a good effect, bad effect, uncertain?
And then, of course, we could get narrative information for
them to explain why.
And then also, another component of the attitude was asking them questions about
what they think would happen to the baby.
Of course, we’ve talked it before, some of the negative effects for
themselves is that the baby would suck them dry, they would be malnourished
themselves because poor economic conditions they won't get enough to eat,
the child would not be satisfied.
So, these were how we operationalized this variable into
some specific questions on a survey instrument.
We operationalized intention.
Do you intend to feed the baby with your next child?
We, again assume that they would be having another child.
We then operationalized the questions on the perceived social support or
social norms, and mentioned a number of different people.
Would your husband support the idea?
Would your own mother?
Would your mother in law?
Would your sisters, would the other women in the household?
And we ask them, do they think these people would agree that this is
a good idea, a bad idea or they would be uncertain?
And so we could develop a composite score of the response of the perception of
whether each of these six groups of people would support or not support.
Then, of course, the next thing when we're talking about models,
again statistics provide us with regression models.
And in this case, we put in the different variables of exclusive
breastfeeding that we've talked about.
The attitude toward the behavior,
the perceived support, the perceived norms, and the intention.
And with this particular model we found that
both of those factors were associated with intention.
So, if they had a positive attitude toward exclusive breastfeeding,
that it would make their baby healthy, strong.
If they felt that other people would think that exclusive breastfeeding
is a good idea, that most of those thought so, then their intention
was higher than those people who did not have a positive attitude,
did not have a perception, a positive perception of support from other people.
So, we can actually test these, and
then we can use this information to design programs, knowing that, in fact,
these are important variables, that if we want women to practice this,
we have to explain the benefits, and show them that it's not dangerous.
But more than that, we also have to do community education with husbands and
older women in the household,
reaching them through their social groups in the market to let them know that this
is a behavior that they should encourage among their daughters.