Indian Health Information Networks (2017-2018)
In Uttar Pradesh, a state of over 200 million people in northern India, negative childhood health indicators such as infant mortality and malnutrition have remained among the highest in the world despite multiple initiatives to improve them.
Social accountability (SA) interventions, which seek to empower community members and facilitate monitoring of public healthcare providers and local officials, seem to be a promising way to help citizens mobilize to act for positive change. However, how to best deliver SA interventions is an open question, and likely depends on the structure of social networks within villages.
This team’s goal was to evaluate the general effectiveness of a widespread SA intervention, peer effects on social accountability outcomes and how any such effects are moderated by village network structure. The team’s intervention included 1) providing information to households about entitled benefits and about relative performance of health indicators in their village, and 2) facilitating meetings between community members and public service providers enabling households to redress grievances.
Team members introduced network interventions testing the effectiveness of different information sources and peer effects within individuals’ networks on participation behavior. This resulted in full community level network data on three types of relations (financial ties, health discussion ties and friend/social ties) for 25607 households & 79249 people.
Preliminary results suggested a strong positive effect of the SA intervention and point to a further need for research to model change in network structure as a function of SA interventions.
Timing
Fall 2017 – Spring 2018
Team Outputs
Manoj Mohanan. Social Networks and Child Malnutrition in a Resource Limited Setting ($195,662 grant awarded from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development)
Indian Health Information Networks (poster by James Moody, Manoj Mohanan, Kendal Swanson, Mudit Kumar Singh, Joseph Quinn, Lavanya Singh, Felicia Chen, Pranav Ganapathy), presented at Bass Connections Showcase, April 18, 2018
This Team in the News
Interdisciplinary Researchers Discuss Faculty-Student Research