Gender-neutral? Not just yet

It was during an interview with a school principal, a well-respected man in the community. The respondent was all too happy to cooperate, answering our researcher’s questions at length. But in the middle of the interview, he paused and grabbed her hand, explaining that he holds the hands of disobedient children. But he didn’t let go.

She finished the interview, extracted her hand and left with her colleagues. But it shook us all up, an unnerving and unwelcome incident. For the remaining interviews, we asked a male field worker to accompany our female staff, and there were no more incidents. But as an organization, we do vehemently defend and uphold our independence and work towards making the development sector gender-neutral. This was a sad setback.

The loo that wasn’t

A loo isn’t supposed to be pretty but this one was. A bright yellow building, newly painted, it gleamed in the sun. The teacher who was guiding us pointed it out proudly – “that’s the girls’ toilets” she said.

“Can we go in?” we asked. “It’s locked” she stammered. “Don’t you have the key?” we asked, wondering why anyone would lock a toilet. By this time the School Principal had joined us. We told him it was a beautiful building and could we look inside? Again he didn’t seem keen, but he unlocked the building.

And inside was a bare floor, no latrine, no tap, not even a hole.

Knock knock? Who’s there? No one!

Respondents don’t just stay at the field site – they move around over time. Especially in rural areas, members of the household often migrate to nearby cities or urban areas in search of work. But what happens when we are required to conduct a baseline, midline as well as an end-line study in the same location with the same respondents? You may not find your respondents in their home all year round. And this is exactly what happened to us!

We were conducting an end-line study in Rajasthan in November, but just couldn’t find the baseline respondents we had surveyed earlier. We knocked on their homes only to find from the family members that the original respondent had migrated either to Gujarat to harvest cotton or to Punjab to sow wheat.

Lesson learned: Look at migration patterns and cropping cycles before deciding on study phases!

Why you need that pre-test

“How do you clean your hands?”

“With mud”, he answered. 

“Could you show us?”

He walked over to the tap, diligently scrubbed his hands with water, applied soap and washed it off. No mud ever entered the process.

It was a study to understand hand hygiene practices, and we were using a survey tool, enumerators’ observations and spot checks to understand how people washed their hands. The rationale for using multiple methods was to check how people washed their hands, without trying to impress the enumerator or changing their behavior because they were being watched.

As this example shows, different tools found different answers. Yet it was difficult to reconcile the findings during analysis as there was no accompanying qualitative data to explain why the respondent would say one thing and do another. Luckily, during the pre-test, our researchers had noticed this. We found that respondents, who had interacted with peer educators telling them to wash their hands with soap and water, thought they were being asked to show the ideal way to wash hands and not how they normally do it.