Guidelines for conducting prevalence studies on reproductive morbidity. Draft.

This set of guidelines was developed to help researchers determine the extent and nature of reproductive morbidity in developing countries. After presenting definitions for obstetric morbidity (direct indirect and psychological) gynecological morbidity (direct indirect and psychological) and contraceptive morbidity possible sources of existing information are considered (health providers health care service records previous studies and other sources). Guidelines are given for generating morbidity data from community-based studies and the following types of community-based prevalence studies are detailed: 1) those involving the clinical examination of eligible women 2) those involving the clinical examination of symptomatic women only 3) whose involving women who use local health services and 4) those which consider perceived reproductive morbidity. The next section discusses the use of a pregnancy follow-up approach to study reproductive morbidity and the final section considers the use of a combination of methods and the necessity to include a means of validating results. Appended information provides 1) suggestions for developing and pretesting data collection instruments 2) information on interviewer selection and training 3) an example of an interview for a community prevalence study 4) notes on the interview schedule 5) an example of a clinical examination record 6) an example of a laboratory results record and 7) operational definitions of some reproductive morbidities.