TY - JOUR
T1 - The Menstrual Practices Questionnaire (MPQ)
T2 - development, elaboration, and implications for future research
AU - Hennegan, Julie
AU - Nansubuga, Agnes
AU - Akullo, Agnes
AU - Smith, Calum
AU - Schwab, Kellogg J.
N1 - Funding Information:
The development of the MPQ was funded by The Case for Her and the Osprey Foundation of Maryland. The funders had no role in study design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We are indebted to the numerous experts in menstrual health who took the time to review draft items and provide their insights.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2020/10/15
Y1 - 2020/10/15
N2 - High-quality evidence is needed to inform policies and programmes aiming to improve menstrual health. Quantitative studies must address the many evidence gaps in this field, and practitioners have increased monitoring and evaluation efforts to track their progress. A significant barrier to improving the rigor of this work is the lack of comprehensive and comparable measures to capture core concepts. The Menstrual Practices Questionnaire (MPQ) is a new tool to support comprehensive and standardised assessment of the activities undertaken in order to collect, contain, and remove menstrual blood from the body in self-report surveys. The questionnaire is freely available online for download and can be adapted for use across contexts and age groups. In this article, we describe the purpose of the MPQ as a best-practice tool to align the description of menstrual practices and provide a foundation for further question refinement. We outline the development of the tool using systematic review of qualitative studies of menstrual experiences, audit of measures used in the study of menstrual health and hygiene, survey of experts, insights from past research, and examples from piloted questions in a survey of adolescent girls in Soroti, Uganda. We describe the identification of menstrual practices as a priority for measurement, coverage of practices included in the MPQ, and justify the inclusion of location-specific questions. For each section of the questionnaire, we outline key reasons for the inclusion of practice items alongside elaboration for users to help inform item selection. Finally, we outline priorities for future research to refine the assessment and reporting of menstrual practices, including the identification of minimum reporting requirements for population characteristics to facilitate comparison across studies, testing the extent to which experiences during the most recent menstrual period reflect those over longer time periods, and further exploration of biases in self-report.
AB - High-quality evidence is needed to inform policies and programmes aiming to improve menstrual health. Quantitative studies must address the many evidence gaps in this field, and practitioners have increased monitoring and evaluation efforts to track their progress. A significant barrier to improving the rigor of this work is the lack of comprehensive and comparable measures to capture core concepts. The Menstrual Practices Questionnaire (MPQ) is a new tool to support comprehensive and standardised assessment of the activities undertaken in order to collect, contain, and remove menstrual blood from the body in self-report surveys. The questionnaire is freely available online for download and can be adapted for use across contexts and age groups. In this article, we describe the purpose of the MPQ as a best-practice tool to align the description of menstrual practices and provide a foundation for further question refinement. We outline the development of the tool using systematic review of qualitative studies of menstrual experiences, audit of measures used in the study of menstrual health and hygiene, survey of experts, insights from past research, and examples from piloted questions in a survey of adolescent girls in Soroti, Uganda. We describe the identification of menstrual practices as a priority for measurement, coverage of practices included in the MPQ, and justify the inclusion of location-specific questions. For each section of the questionnaire, we outline key reasons for the inclusion of practice items alongside elaboration for users to help inform item selection. Finally, we outline priorities for future research to refine the assessment and reporting of menstrual practices, including the identification of minimum reporting requirements for population characteristics to facilitate comparison across studies, testing the extent to which experiences during the most recent menstrual period reflect those over longer time periods, and further exploration of biases in self-report.
KW - Menstrual health
KW - menstrual hygiene
KW - outcome assessment
KW - reproductive health
KW - survey
KW - women’s health
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U2 - 10.1080/16549716.2020.1829402
DO - 10.1080/16549716.2020.1829402
M3 - Article
C2 - 33052077
AN - SCOPUS:85092570498
SN - 1654-9716
VL - 13
JO - Global health action
JF - Global health action
IS - 1
M1 - 1829402
ER -