Navigating women’s reproductive health through Anthropological research Methods

There has always been a dearth of appropriate methodological orientations within social sciences, including anthropology when it comes to conducting an in-depth and detailed research on women’s reproductive experiences. This is largely owing to the fact that, the disciplines that are suppose to research reproduction have started relying, rather inadvertently on the so called “Qualitative Methods” instead of more broad based discipline specific approaches. Research in Anthropology and other allied disciplines namely, Epidemiology, Economics, Demography, Medical Sciences and Population Studies are still carried out in accordance with the “Consensus Models” under which it is generally assumed that the behaviour of a society’s reproductive-age women and the other actors is, to a large extent, same. However, on the other hand, the rampant use of qualitative methods as a substitute to the discipline based approaches have now become common place in researching the social cultural dimensions of women’s reproductive experiences. In the case of qualitative research, it’s being observed that instead of using more suitable and properly directed methods the researchers are using techniques that undermine the need for particular types of evidence, which basically impose various procedural measures that may severely constrain the applicability of the information collected, ultimately leading to substandard research. The main problem with the qualitative research is not in the methods per se, but in misguided separation of method from theory, of the techniques and the larger cultural contexts or settings of the study. Multidisciplinary or Transdisciplinary research is necessary for investigating, understanding and improving women’s reproductive health, but what is required is, methods that are less narrowly focused, less generic, more theoretical, more widespread in application of the concepts and knowledge generated from relevant disciplines. The present paper therefore advocates a more anthropological approach for gathering and interpreting information that yields insights on women’s reproductive experiences especially in the backdrop a pluralistic society like India. The anthropological approach is characterized by its context specificity and the comparative evidence which will lead us to more realistic and plausible conclusions.