Questionnaires
Three types of questionnaires were used in the NFHS: the Household Questionnaire, the Women's Questionnaire, and the Village Questionnaire. The overall content and format of the questionnaires were determined in a Questionnaire Design Workshop held in Pune in September, 1991. The workshops were attended by representatives from all the PRCs, the Consulting Organizations, MOHFW, IIPS, other Indian organizations, USAID, and the East-West Center/macro Internationational. The contents and design of the questionnaires were based broadly on the DHS Model B Questionnaire, which is designed primarily for use in countries with low contraceptives prevalence. Keeping in the view the Indian sociocultural milieu and the objectives of the NFHS, additions and modifications were made to the model questionnaires after extensive deliberations at the workshop. In addition to a standard set of questions in all the states of the NFHS, it was decided at the workshop that individual states could recommend a number of state-specific questions which would be formulated after considering the issues of importance in each state. Based on the recommendations of this workshop, the questionnaires were finalized at IIPS, Bombay. The questionnaires are largely precoded, with fixed response categories.
A pretest of the questionnaires was carried out IIPS with the help of the PRC, Bhopal, in October, 1991. A 10-day training session for the interviewers and supervisors was conducted at the PRC. For the pretesting of the questionnaire, a total of 150 pretest interviews were completed in two villages near Bhopal and a few urban blocks within Bhopal city. After the pretest, appropriate changes were made in the questionnaires, based on the experience of the pretest. Questionnaires used in each state were bilingual, consisting of questions in both the state language and English. In each state, the entire content of the questionnaire was translated to the state language and then independently translated back to English. Appropriote changes were made in the translation of questions for which the back-translated version did not compare well with the original English version. The PRCs in these states undertook the responsibility of translating the questionnaires into the state language and pretesting the translated version of the questionnaires.
a) The Household Questionnaire was used to list all usual residents in each sample household plus any visitors who stayed in the household the night before the interview. Some basic information was collected on the characteristics of each person listed, including age, sex, marital status, education, occupation, and relationship to the head of the household, as well as health status? The main purpose of this section of the Household Questionnaires (Ever-married women age 13-49 years). In addition, the Household Questionnaire collected information on household conditions, such as the source of water, type of toilet facilities, materials used in the construction of the house, source of lighting, cooking fuel, ownership of agricultural land and livestock, ownership of various consumer durable goods, and characteristics of the head of the household such as religion, caste or tribe. The Household Questionnaire also included household birth and death records wherein all the live births and deaths that took place within the last two years in the household were recorded.
b) The Women's Questionnaire was used to collect information from eligible women - that is, all ever-married women, usual residents as well as visitors, age 13-49 years. The Woman's Questionnaire consisted of seven sections :
- Respondent's Background: Questions on age, marital status, caste/tribe, religion, education of the eligible woman are included. If the respondent is a vistir, information about her own household is also collected.
- Reproduction: In this section, information is collected about the births that a woman had during her life. The information collected includes the total number of sons and daughters that a woman has given birth to, information about stillbirths and aborations, a complete birth history (including month and year of birth, current age, sex, survival status, and if dead, age at death for each of live births), and information about current pregnancy and menstruations status.
- Contraception : This section collects information on the knowledge, ever use and current use of various family planning methods, intentions for future use, attitudes about family planning, exposure to family planning messages, and for current users, the duration of use, source of the method, and problems experiences with use.
- Health of Children: the question in this section realte to births in the year of the survey as well as to all the births in the previous four calendar years. The objective of this section is to obtain information related to the health of children. The topics included antenatal care, breastfeeding, vaccinations and recent illness of young children. The questions are organized into two subsections: section 4A containing questions on pregnancy and breastfeeding and section 4B containing questions on immunization and health of children.
- Fertility Preferences: this section gathers information on the desire for additional children, ideal family size and sex composition of children, preferred and ideal birth intervals, and husband's attitude about family size.
- Husband's background and Women's Work: Question related to age, education and work status of the husband as well as questions on the work status of the woman hearself are included.
- Height and Weight: the nutrinational status of children was measured using both weight and height/length of children under age 4 in most of the states.
c) The Village Questionnaire was used to collect information on all villages covered in the NFHS. The village Questionnaire included information on various amenities available in the villages such as electricity, water, transportation, and educationnal and health facilities.
In addition to the above standard questions used in all states of the NFHS, a set of state-specific questions was added in most of the states on issues of importance in thoses states. Accordingly, a set of questions on knowledge of AIDS was added to the NFHS in Arunachal, Pradesh, Assam, Delhi, Goa, Gujurat, Maharashtra, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tamil Nadu, TRipura, and west Bengal. The topics covered by state-specific questions in the other states are: dowry in Bihar, age at marriage in Rajasthan, sex preference for children in Uttar Pradesh, international migration in Kerala, Green Cards in Madhya Pradesh, benefits received from antipoverty programmes in Karnataka, and sex preselection and international migration in Penjab.