Gender, Power and Communicative Action: Qualitative Findings from Selected Nepali Communities: Abstract

"...[M]ost participants’ narratives implied that communication and shared decision-making is increasingly normative. Even so, men continue to make more of the economic decisions, while women are more likely to make decisions related to childrearing."

The focus of this Health Communication Capacity Collaborative presentation for the International SBCC Summit 2016, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, February 8-10, is on family planning (FP), in Nepal.

From the abstract:
"The USAID-funded Health Communication Capacity Collaborative or HC3-Nepal (2013-2017) aims to build national capacity for, and contribute to, the design, implementation and evaluation of strategic family planning SBCC campaigns with the goal of improving health outcomes in Nepal. A key goal of the formative research was to understand in more depth partner communication and decision-making dynamics to inform future family planning programming. Sixty in-depth interviews (IDIs) were conducted with married and unmarried men and women, including migrants and disadvantaged group members, mothers-in-law, health workers, and influential community members. Informed by a social constructionist perspective, inductive and deductive coding was conducted using Atlas.ti and was guided by the framework method, which utilizes comparative techniques to explore similarities and differences between and within transcripts.

Key Highlights:
With few exceptions, men and women in this study highlighted the role of mutual trust, understanding and empathy in their marriages, thus reflecting an orientation towards communicative action. The findings also revealed that decision-making at the household level can be a complicated, complex and non-linear process. While gendered divisions of labor and power are still extant, as Connell theorizes, only a few participants said that men make decisions without consulting their wives; most participants’ narratives implied that communication and shared decision-making is increasingly normative. Even so, men continue to make more of the economic decisions, while women are more likely to make decisions related to childrearing."