Dr. Mike Smith, Director of Policy and Programs for the Center for Applied Research and Evaluation (CARE) in Women’s Health at East Tennessee State University College of Public Health and Associate Professor in the Department of Health Services Management and Policy will serve as Site Principal Investigator on an NIH funded grant titled “Evaluating indirect survey question methods on reproductive health behavior.” Smith will be collaborating with Dr. Heide Jackson and Dr. Michael Rendall, primary grantees at the Maryland Population Research Center, University of Maryland, as well as with colleagues at the University of California at Los Angeles, Rutgers University, and the Guttmacher Institute. The two-year grant is funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Reproductive health services are essential primary care services and key to health and well-being. Accurate measurement of people’s reproductive health behavior is needed in order to monitor trends in reproductive health care access and use over time and assess disparities in access to care across population groups and geographies. Without accurate measurement, efforts to assess the reproductive health needs of diverse population groups are constrained. Additionally, efforts to evaluate the impact of reproductive health programs and policies, at the local, state, and national levels, are also hindered. While alternative approaches to measuring reproductive health behavior exist, close examination and comparison of these approaches is lacking. This project will specifically address this gap as it seeks to identify valid and reliable measures of reproductive health behavior.
The project will pool data from the Statewide Survey of Women collected across multiple states in the U.S. This is a novel and unique source of data on reproductive health care use, barriers to care, experiences with care, and associated outcomes. The population-based survey collects data from representative samples of women of reproductive age and allows for the generation of state-level estimates of key measures and outcomes.
“Measuring things accurately matters, especially if the data collected is being used to make programmatic or policy decisions that can affect the health of diverse populations,” said Dr. Smith. “This project is important because it helps us to develop more accurate data collection tools that can produce more accurate data to help people seeking health care and people leading health care organizations make more informed decisions.”