Sponsor
This work was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), and Department for International Development-backed SHARE Research Consortium at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Published In
American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-2016
Subjects
Sanitation -- Health aspects -- India, Sanitation -- Social aspects -- India
Abstract
Although large-scale programs, like India's Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), have improved latrine coverage in rural settings, evidence suggests that actual use is suboptimal. However, the reliability of methods to assess latrine use is uncertain. We assessed the reliability of reported use, the standard method, by comparing survey-based responses against passive latrine use monitors (PLUMs) through a cross-sectional study among 292 households in 25 villages in rural Odisha, India, which recently received individual household latrines under the TSC. PLUMs were installed for 2 weeks and householders responded to surveys about their latrine use behavior. Reported use was compared with PLUM results using Bland–Altman (BA) plots and concordance statistics. Reported use was higher than corresponding PLUM-recorded events across the range of comparisons. The mean reported “usual” daily events per household (7.09, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 6.51, 7.68) was nearly twice that of the PLUM-recorded daily average (3.62, 95% CI = 3.29, 3.94). There was poor agreement between “usual” daily latrine use and the average daily PLUM-recorded events (ρc = 0.331, 95% CI = 0.242, 0.427). Moderate agreement (ρc = 0.598, 95% CI = 0.497, 0.683) was obtained when comparing daily reported use during the previous 48 hours with the average daily PLUM count. Reported latrine use, though already suggesting suboptimal adoption, likely exaggerates the actual level of uptake of latrines constructed under the program. Where reliance on self-reports is used, survey questions should focus on the 48 hours prior to the date of the survey rather than asking about “usual” latrine use behavior.
DOI
10.4269/ajtmh.16-0102
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/18552
Citation Details
Sinha, A., Nagel, C. L., Thomas, E., Schmidt, W. P., Torondel, B., Boisson, S., & Clasen, T. F. (2016). Assessing Latrine Use in Rural India: A Cross-Sectional Study Comparing Reported Use and Passive Latrine Use Monitors. The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 95(3), 720–727.
Description
© The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Originally published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and can be found online: https://doi.org/10.4269/ajtmh.16-0102