Sanitation, Stress and Life Stage: A Systematic Data Collection Study among Women in Odisha, India

This PLOS ONE paper by Hulland et al. (2015) is part of SHARE-WSSCC co-funded study examining sanitation-related psychosocial stress across women’s reproductive lives in three distinct geographic sites in Odisha, India. The study has developed and tested an innovative metric for capturing this difficult-to-measure outcome by asking women to identify common stressors that they encountered when practising sanitation and to sort these based on frequency and severity. The study was able to conclude that the sanitation behaviours that were most constricted (i.e. menstruation) were the most stressful.