Conference Post 2: Traditional Health Practices in Nepal

My second conference blog is coming from a graduate student paper in health communication I heard presented this Friday. The idea may not be exceptionally new, but I thought it was exciting to know that others in my field are pursuing interesting work relevant to global health. It was called “Perception of Social Power and Compliance Based on Traditional Health Beliefs in Nepal” by Yerina S. Ranjit from the University of Connecticut.

The presentation began with a discussion on the social structure in Nepal relevant to young women. When a woman marries, she joins her husband’s family and relocates to live with them. In general, these women have very low social power. Ranjit did not find that this was as true when women were from wealthier families or had received a stronger education. But in general, the younger women had low social power. Mothers-in-law, however, had high social power. They made major decisions for the family.

This social structure became problematic for issues relevant to the health of these young women and their children when they became pregnant or were raising young children. Traditional health beliefs about pregnancy and child nutrition were not in-line with what was actually best for the mother’s and children’s health. And, the social structure did not always allow women to protest against these traditional health practices, causing them to comply whether they agreed with the practice or not.

This has a very relevant implication for health interventions that we have discussed previously. An intervention targeting the young mothers may be effective in changing their attitudes or beliefs about these health practices, but the mothers may not have the social power to enact behavior change. Therefore, interventions that solely target the mothers in this particular social environment would not result in the desired health behavior change.

What must be done instead is to have an intervention that does still target young mothers, but also targets mothers-in-law. These women are the gatekeepers to behavior change in their families and have the social power to promote these changes. I do not claim that this would be an easy task. These women are operating from strongly held beliefs that have been passed down in the past by their families. Changing their attitudes and beliefs would involve delicacy and the involvement of community members.

The main results from the paper were that women with greater wealth or education were less likely to comply with traditional health practices imposed by mothers-in-law, because they perceived the power distance between them to be smaller. This also points to the solution of increasing educational opportunities for young women to increase their perception of their own social power. This is also, however, not a simple solution.