Development and use of the women's health protocol

In January 1990, we began working with Moni Nag and Pertti Pelto on a Ford Foundation-funded project entitled "Increasing Social Science Research Capacity for Women's Reproductive Health in India." Little research had been carried out on women's reproductive health in India, and the majority of studies that had been done were clinic-based. The one community-based epidemiological study of gynecological disease that had been published found that 92 percent of rural Indian women (in a sample of 650) had one or more gynecological or sexually transmitted diseases, with an average of 3.6 diseases per woman (R. A. Bang, A. T. Bang, M. Baitule, Y. Choudhary, S. Sarmukaddam, and O. Tale, "High Prevalence of Gynecological Diseases in Rural Indian Women," The Lancet [January 14, 1989]). In addition to the lack of epidemiological data, there was a paucity of sociocultural information on how women perceive their own health and morbidity and what factors influence care seeking by and for Indian women.