Pre-Departure

“A party / Of traveling-companions has assembled…”
-(Rabindranath Tagore, translated by William Radice)

Twelve days until we arrive in the Hubli-Dharwad (HD) region for our orientation with the Deshpande Foundation (DF). Then begins our seven-week interaction with our partner NGO, the Family Planning Association of India (FPAI).

The preparation has already begun--the main task being to receive the institutional green light: IRB approval. Our fingers are crossed in hopes of expedited review. Nothing that we are going to do should harm participants, so I imagine our prospects are good....

Completing the IRB was no easy task. Our initial proposal (for which we received funding) had direction, but it lacked a protocol to achieve realization. To complete the IRB, we needed to outline a plan for achieving our goals. After long debate about how best to do this, we found our solution through careful review of various publications by Ravi Verma and colleagues (link). For the sake of scientific rigor and to maximize feasibility, we realized that we could not re-invent the wheel, and so we designed a protocol to adapt and implement the Yaari Dosti intervention following as closely as possible to that used by Verma in his adaption of Program H (link) to Yaari Dosti (link). Briefly, Verma et al 1) identified men to act as peer leaders and formative researchers, 2) conducted (mostly qualitative) research to determine how the intervention needed to change, 3) modified the program, 4) implemented the modified intervention, and 5) measured the results (primarily in a quantitative way).

The main aspect that will be different about our intervention is that ours will likely contain a follow-up component that would make use of mobile technology. Cell phones have been used for a number of health-related purposes (link), but it appears that the type of message reinforcement that we are hoping to implement has never been carried out before.

A difficulty that we anticipate running into will be recruiting peer leaders. Thanks to our classmate Menaka, we have been able to make several contacts in HD, who should be able to help us begin recruiting peer leaders even before we arrive (as these men are not research subjects per se, we see no problem recruiting them prior to IRB approval). We have Naveen Lakshmipathy, Dulcie Madden, and Naveen Jha especially to thank on this front.

Obtaining funding to pay the peer leaders is a new challenge that we are addressing by applying for mini-grants from various mobile communications providers and NGOs.

The next steps will be to further familiarize ourselves with the Yaari Dosti training manual, to gather all necessary supplies, and to arrive in India without any mishaps.