8.1 Purpose and procedure

The perinatal journey is steeped in ritual, tradition, and advice of many kinds. As part of the extensive Project RISE data, we have responses from participants that allow us to address the question: who do women and ASHAs most commonly mention as sources of information in different aspects of perinatal behavior and which of these named sources have the biggest influence on doing or not-doing each of these behaviors?

To address these question on influencers, we follow these steps:

  1. for each of the yes/no questions covered in Chapter 7, count the number of times that respondents name each type of influencer and convert these to percentages for easier comparison

  2. for each question/influencer combination, estimate how each influencer category affected the probability of saying ‘yes’ to the question, given certain controls, using a large statistical model

  3. follow this procedure for both datasets, Mothers and ASHAs

  4. use the dataset to analyze groups of questions by broad categories of behavior (biomedically recommended, not-recommended, and neutral)

  5. examine differences is how often influencers are associated with a behavior (salience) compared to their estimated statistical effect on women actually doing the behavior