The Role of Male Partners in the Breastfeeding Practices of Female Readymade Garment Workers in Bangladesh
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bangladesh, once deemed one of the world's poorest nations upon gaining independence in 1971, has achieved remarkable progress through various factors such as a robust demographic dividend, successful readymade garments exports, resilient remittance inflows, and stable macroeconomic conditions. However, despite these significant improvements, Bangladesh continues to grapple with challenges related to child survival, maternal and neonatal health, and nutrition. Among the essential practices for a child's optimal nutrition and development, breastfeeding stands as a crucial means of safeguarding the health of both mother and infant. Regrettably, female garment workers in Bangladesh encounter obstacles in breastfeeding, with limited research conducted on how their male partners can offer support in this domain. To address this gap, I conducted a qualitative study to understand the role of male partners of female readymade garment workers in breastfeeding practices. Due to travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, twenty female workers and ten male partners were remotely interviewed via Zoom. The research demonstrates the application of Braun and Clarke's Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA) as a flexible and reflexive framework for analyzing qualitative data, enabling a comprehensive exploration of breastfeeding experiences while mitigating researcher biases. The findings showed that men needed an understanding of the significance of assuming responsible roles as fathers and husbands. Instead, they perceived childbearing and breastfeeding as solely women's responsibilities. This perspective reflects the hindrance of traditional gendered roles in men's ability to support their breastfeeding wives in a patriarchal society. Women believed that men's role primarily encompassed accompanying them to medical appointments, providing sustenance, and assisting with domestic chores while displaying less respect towards their wives as equal partners in the family. Unlike previous studies, my research emphasizes the viewpoints of male partners, offering valuable insights into the dynamics within the households of female workers in the garment industry. The study underscores the importance of sensitizing men to recognize and respect women's roles within the family, the necessity of challenging patriarchal norms and promoting gender-sensitive interventions encouraging men to support breastfeeding practices and assume shared family responsibilities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".