12,007 The Communication Initiative, The Drum Beat – 668 – A Brief Chronology of a Polio Communication Research Initiative

This edition of The Drum Beat provides a brief history of the involvement of The CI and others, what the study seeks to achieve, and where we are in the process. We will publish another Drum Beat in the autumn, when the analysis is complete. For now, we hope that this background and update will spark your interest and invite you to watch for updates via our Polio Networks space.

One of these people was Dr. Taylor, who, along with Ellyn Ogden from USAID, has been a driving force behind the development and design of the research. As an expert advisor to the polio programme, Dr. Taylor had long been concerned by the often narrow focus of polio communication research on polio alone and its dependence on knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP) surveys, primarily aimed at sampling for population-scale findings. This, he felt, mistakenly assumed that polio occupied a place at the centre of caregivers’ health decision-making, operating methodologically at a scale that was inconsistent with the highly localised, arguably highly nuanced levels at which positive and negative variances in household attitudes were being detected. Thus, the conventional KAP approach was unlikely to provide the robust, localised data required to design strategies to reach smaller communities where uptake of health services such as immunisation was low. (For more on Dr Taylor’s thinking on the application of QCA to polio eradication, see: Polio Eradication – Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis to Strengthen Understanding of Social Factors in Programme Effectiveness.)

Operating in a country with a continuing problem of circulating polio virus, UNICEF Pakistan had expressed interest in conducting a similar study. The CI and UNICEF Pakistan along with USAID decided to go ahead with a scaled-down version that did not require external funding. We planned to begin in late January 2013, but geo-politics intervened through the tragic killings of polio workers in December 2012 and subsequent violent attacks on people working with polio programming. We were forced to postpone the Pakistan research indefinitely but remained convinced of the utility of the research and its applicability across all endemic countries. When USAID expressed interest in conducting the research at scale in Nigeria, we jumped at the chance, and Dr. Taylor met with The CI, USAID, and Hassan Jibiya (a Nigerian consultant) to refine the concept and design for northern Nigeria. (For the original Nigerian study outline, please see Understanding Attitudes to Immunisation in Northern Nigeria: A Research Outline)

Most large-scale health programmes, including those to strengthen RI (often in areas that are hard to access/ traverse or are chronically insecure), are complex and often fast-moving. The GPEI, in its end-game zone of implementation, is even more so. One thing that became readily apparent was that programme partners had scarce resources of time to allocate to research, which required us as researchers to make absolutely manifest its potential utility to the programme. Given that there is a hope that polio transmission will be interrupted in Nigeria in 2014 (though we recognise the risk of such hopefulness), the research also had to demonstrate that it had utility both to the immediate needs of the programme and to its longer-term strategic goals. For this reason, the research was consciously structured to incorporate both polio and RI attitudes.

The interviews have now all been conducted, and the data are in the process of being analysed. We expect to make the results available sometime in September, and we will publish another edition of The Drum Beat on the results as well as publish them on the Nigerian research area of The CI’s polio theme site. We will also publish updates as they become available on Polio Networks.