Karra Gives Seminar Talk at Harvard School of Public Health
Mahesh Karra, Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, gave a seminar talk at the Harvard School of Public Health’s Willows Speaker Series on February 14, 2018.
Karra’s talk, entitled “Enthnolinguistic Concordance and the Provision of Post-partum IUD Counseling Services in Sri Lanka,” examined the relationships between ethnolinguistic concordance and the provision of postpartum family planning with a special focus on immediate postpartum IUD (PPIUD) counseling services in Sri Lanka.
From the abstract of the study:
In this study, we examine the relationships between ethnolinguistic concordance and the provision of postpartum family planning with a special focus on immediate postpartum IUD (PPIUD) counseling services in Sri Lanka. We use data from a cluster-randomized stepped-wedge trial in which women who delivered in any one of six hospitals in the trial were offered antenatal counseling and postnatal health services, which included the opportunity to have an immediate PPIUD inserted following their delivery. We merge baseline data on postpartum women from the main trial with data collected on local Primary Health Midwives (PHMs), and we generate indicators of linguistic concordance (whether or not the woman’s spoken language(s) match with the spoken language(s) of her local Primary Health Midwife), ethnic concordance (whether or not the woman’s ethnicity matches with the ethnicity of her local Primary Health Midwife) and their joint interaction (concordance across both ethnic and linguistic dimensions). We assess how these measures of concordance are related to women’s acceptance and receipt of PPIUD counseling services as well as to the quality of counseling that was provided, controlling for other confounding variables. We find that women from ethnolinguistic minority groups in Sri Lanka face larger disparities in their receipt of PPIUD counseling. Moreover, we identify ethnic discordance between women and their PHM to be the primary driver of this disparity rather than linguistic discordance. Our findings suggest that matching women and their service providers based on ethnicity are likely to reduce disparities in health service provision.
Karra’s academic and research interests are broadly in development economics, health economics, quantitative methods, and applied demography. His research utilizes experimental and non-experimental methods to investigate the relationships between population, health, and economic development in low- and middle-income countries.