Report 2011 - Deepalaya

PART 3 - ANALYSIS
Our general Questionnaire has been prepared for married women who are visiting Deepalaya's clinic or are
living in or around Gusbethi.
The aim of this Questionnaire is to identify habits and living conditions that might contribute to the problem of
anemia amongst rural Indian population, and to understand the beliefs associated with some common
practices, as well as religious and cultural influences. We tried to target the most contributing factors in this
area, then to compare with the rest of India. We included many questions related to pregnancy and
motherhood but we couldn't exclude non-pregnant women as we could not meet so many women during our
internship.
Thus, we have interviewed 30 volunteer married women, without any criteria of age or village. This way we
have asked people corresponding to these criteria coming to the clinic for any reason and we went to the
villages. The context of interview varies a lot. In some cases, we joined the doctor and made the interview while
he was doing the consultation. In most cases, privacy was impossible and many other people were attending
the conversation, men included some occasions. Answers might also have been influenced by their mind set,
especially in hospital where people were in a hurry to head back to there house. We had to adjust the length of
our questionnaire as many women were getting irritated of being asked private questions by foreigners like us
without getting anything in return. A translator helped us to first get in touch with them, but as he could not
always be available, we had to ask to different people (clinic staff) to translate our questions to the villagers and
for a couple times we had to interview without any translator and we had some doubt about the full
understanding of each others. Thus, our questions and answers have been translated in many different ways,
reducing its validity. In this way, we are missing some answers and information for some patients because they
could not understand our questions or because we didn't have time to ask to them.
For some questions, especially age related questions, many women could not answer properly as they didn't
know the answer and our translator calculated their age according to the number of children they have.
Finally, the population that we have chosen for our research project is very different from the rest of India and
even from Haryana state for many reasons, as explained in the next sections.
General information
We have done our interviews from October 10 th to October 29 th , in the clinic (for 17 of our 30 women) and in
villages. Seven of them were pregnant women but 22 of them were less than 40 years old and could still give
birth. The average age of all women is 32 years old and 97 % are Muslims. Hindus account for 80,5 % of the
total population in India on the whole (ADB Report, 2009) 89 . Knowing the differences associated with the
religion, we understand that our survey might not be representative of the rest of India, even though most
population of this country (72%) is living in rural area 90 . Nearly 3/4 of the population (of India) still lives in rural
areas (2004) 91 .The women we have interviewed come from Gusbethi, Pathuka and Kiruri villages. These three
villages have always been provided health care services by Deepalaya's clinic but the Mobile Clinic was not used
to go there.
We have noticed the importance of cultural and religious beliefs through this survey and through our visits to
the villages as some women are visiting the religious leader of their village. For example, in Patuka village,
people meet the “Molawi” when they have health problem. From him they get threads and prayers that,
89 R e f e r e n c e 1 8
90 R e f e r e n c e 2 - p . 8 0 0
91 R e f e r e n c e 5 - p . 4