Impact of beliefs on perception of newborn illness, caregiver behaviors, and care-seeking practices in Zambia’s Southern province
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite reductions in the number of under-five deaths since the release of the Sustainable Development Goals, the proportion of neonatal deaths among all under-five deaths has remained high. Neonatal health is linked to newborn care practices which are tied to distinct cultural perceptions of health and illness. We assessed how community beliefs in Zambia's Southern Province influence newborn care behaviors, perception of illness, and care-seeking practices, using qualitative data collected between February and April 2010. A total of 339 women participated in 36 focus group discussions (FGDs), with 9 FGDs conducted in each of the four study districts. In addition, 42 in-depth interviews (IDIs) were conducted with various key informants, with 11 IDIs conducted in Choma, 11 IDIs in Monze, 10 IDIs in Livingstone, and 10 IDIs in Mazabuka. The FGDs and IDIs indicate that beliefs among the Tonga people regarding postnatal illness prevention and management influence perceptions of newborn illness and care-seeking practices. Care seeking behaviors including when, why, and where parents seek newborn care are intimately tied to perception of disease among the Tonga people. These beliefs may stem from both indigenous and Western perspectives in Zambia's Southern Province. Findings are consistent with other analyses from Southern Province that highlighted the benefit of integrating local practices with Western biomedical care. Health systems models, led by policy makers and program designers, could aim to find synergies between community practices and formal health systems to support positive behavior change and satisfy multiple stakeholders.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".