6.2 Survey context and methods

This presentation of the survey methods applies to all of the quantitative chapters.

The quantitative survey was developed over the course of several months with multiple rounds of input and revision. Many of the questions and response options were based on results from the qualitative studies.

Project RISE investigators interviewed 1200 recent mothers and 400 ASHAs. Three women were recruited for each of the 400 ASHAs, for a total of 1200.

Sampling and recruitment went as follows: Bihar has three major dialects of Hindi: Magahi, Maithili, and Bhojpuri. The region where Maithili is spoken covers a much larger area than the other two. For this reason, one district was sampled from the regions where Magahi and Bhojpuri are spoken, and two were sampled from the region where Maithili is spoken.

District	Language
Gaya	Magahi
Purnia	Maithili
Samastipur	Maithili
Purba Champaran	Bhojpuri

Within each of these four districts, two blocks were randomly sampled, and from within each of the eight selected blocks 50 Anganwadi Centers (AWCs) were sampled. AWCs were the focal sampling unit because these represent the catchment areas for ASHAs. This led to the recruitment of 400 ASHAs (50 AWCs X 8 Blocks).

For the sample of recent mothers, three women were recruited from each of these 400 AWCs, meaning that we have three beneficiaries for each ASHA (with some slight variations around this, but in the majority of cases this ratio held). ‘Recent’ mothers are defined as having given birth within the previous six months.

Trained investigators collected data during a three-month period from June to August 2019, with occasional pauses for locally-relevant holidays and festivals during which participant availability was extremely limited. The field researchers were divided into four teams, each with four female investigators and one supervisor.

6.2.1 Existing descriptive summaries

The quantitative data are descriptively summarized in two informal slide-deck reports. These include frequencies and tabulations for many of the questions in the survey.

For reference, these summaries can be found here, for ASHA and her spheres and here, for ASHA and Mother comparrisons.

The findings presented here overlap with some of those in these previous summaries while also presenting additional synthetic analysis.