Background: Delayed bathing and early initiation of breastfeeding are among the essential interventions\nrecommended to save newborn lives. Although survey coverage reports are key to monitoring these interventions,\nfew studies investigated whether such reports accurately reflect the proportion of mothers and children who\nreceived these interventions. In order to gather accurate data, guidance on how to interview and probe mothers is\nprovided. In this study, we investigated experiences of data collectors when asking mothers survey questions that\nassessed delayed bathing and early initiation of breastfeeding.\nMethods: In November 2013, using a self-administered semi-structured questionnaire, we interviewed data\ncollectors who had taken part in a population-based newborn health household survey in Ethiopia during\nOctober-November 2013. A total of 130 out of 160 invited data collectors completed and returned the\nself-administered questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse quantitative data using SPSS software\nversion 19. Qualitative data showing the variety of probes used by data collectors was analysed by listing, screening\nto identify common themes, and grouping by category.\nResults: Most data collectors reported that, in their opinion, mothers were able to understand the meaning of the\nquestion about newborn bathing (n = 102, 79%) and breastfeeding initiation (n = 106, 82%) without the need for\nprobes. However, fewer mothers were able to recall the event for either newborn behaviours and describe it in\nminutes, hours or days without the need for probes. Overall, only 26% (n = 34) and 34 % (n = 44) of all data collectors\nreported that they did not need any probing for the questions related to newborn bathing and breastfeeding initiation\nquestions, respectively. We identified a variety of probes used by data collectors and present examples.\nConclusion: Considerable probing was necessary to facilitate maternal recall of the events and approximate their\nresponses of time regardless of mothers� age, level of education and parity. This could potentially lead to inaccurate\ncoverage reports due to subjective and inconsistent interpretation of the indicators. Therefore, we recommend\ninclusion of standard probes or follow-on questions to the existing survey tools assessing the two indicators. Data\ncollectors also require further guidance in using appropriate probes to gather accurate maternal responses.
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