We have been working on refining the questionnaires to get them ready for translation into Afan Oromo. We want to trial several elements in the pilot study, and we’ve been discussing the best way to test them.
The social network section of the questionnaire will contain several ‘name generator’ questions, such as “If you needed to advice on health issues who would you ask?”. The participants will be asked several name generator questions (with no cap on the number of people they can name) and collectively their answers builds up a picture of the people in their social network. This sociocentric network information will be used to identify how positions, relationships and density of networks shape the social transmission of FGM/C. A larger number of questions provide more nuanced network data, however, each question takes time to administer as several details of each person named must be recorded.
The pilot study provides an opportunity to test a variety of name generator questions, some of which we haven’t used before. We have spent time refining the precise wording of the name generator questions to trial in the pilot study, from our own experiences as well as from a review of the literature. This is to make sure they are as efficient as possible but still address our research questions. We will be interested to know if people name different people in response to the different questions we are testing, how many names are generated by each question, and whether the questions are phrased in a way that is understood and meaningful to the participants.
We also want to test a slightly different method for the list experiment / unmatched count section which we haven’t tested before. The list experiment is used to understand participants’ attitudes towards FGM/C for their daughters and daughters-in-law. Participants will be asked about several experiences that they might want/not want for their daughters and daughters-in-law, including FGM/C, and they are asked both indirectly and directly.
We will also be trialling some new questions in the general background section of the questionnaire concerning the participants’ opinions about the views of other people in their community towards FGM/C and IPV.
Our intention is to sample around 400 participants for the pilot study. Participants will be selected from three neighbouring ‘zones’ in a location that is convenient for the enumerators. A ‘zone’ is the smallest administrative unit in this area, equivalent to a village.