Productivity/Household Cost Survey Tool: Cultural Adaptation to Sri Lankan Setting

The following is part of a series of project updates from the Department of Community Medicine at Rajarata University of Sri Lanka. MHTF is supporting their project, Measuring Economic Impact of Maternal Morbidity. More information on MHTF supported projects can be found here.

Written by: Department of Community Medicine

The main objective of the MMP project of the Department of Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences, Rajarata University of Sri Lanka was to develop a tool kit to assess productivity and household cost of pregnancy and ill health during pregnancy. After 12 months of project work, the tool kit is now available online for all Sri Lankan researchers and also all the other researchers with similar cultural settings.

This tool kit has originally been developed by the Initiatives for maternal mortality programme assessment (Immpact). The Immpact web tool kit was field tested in Ghana. Since the settings in Ghana was completely different from Sri Lanka culture (and most of the South Asian cultures) the tool kit needed extensive revision. For the cultural adaptation, we used we used the Sumathipala and Murray method in combination with series of focus group discussions, in-depth interviews and two rounds of field testing. We combined the household cost and productivity cost questionnaire of original Immpact tool kit.

An English version of the questionnaire is available on our website. Sinhalese version could be obtained by sending the request to sunethagampodi@yahoo.com. This will be available soon in the website.

Initial assessment of productivity and household cost will be carried out in one district in Sri Lanka. We encourage all other researchers to use this tool kit or cultural adaptation of Immpact tool kit as it proved to be a very good tool in our setting.