Community-Based Needs Assessment for Adolescent Girl's Health Program Using Rapid Response Game Approach

Background: The Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP), Jamkhed has been working with adolescent girls with the objective of improving reproductive health outcomes and addressing the social determinants of health related to the low status of women in society. Although traditional methods like in-depth interviews for assessment of adolescent girls programs (AGP) have proved to be effective, they are often prohibitively expensive and time-consuming.

Objective: To identify key social determinants that impact health of adolescent girls and to test the effectiveness of Rapid Response Game (RRG) approach in conducting formative needs assessment for AGP.

Methods: A total of 99 participants from 4 villages, between ages 13 to 19 were recruited into the study using purposive sampling. Twelve study questions were loosely framed to focus on health, education, and gender discrimination using RRG approach. To assess for informational convergence, In-depth interviews were conducted with 10 participants, and 2 social workers involved with adolescent girl's projects.

Results: Some of the key determinants of health identified by the participants included lack of health information, defined gender roles in society which undermine women's status, several barriers to girls' education, and social norms such as the practice of dowry.

Findings from study using RRG were found to be congruent with those from direct observation and in-depth interviews.

Conclusions: Using an integrated approach for adolescent girl's programming can potentially enhance program effectiveness. RRG is a simple and rapid tool for data gathering and should be tested on a large scale for efficiency in yielding reliable information.