Message from our Secretary

Dear All,
Greetings from Samarth !

The year 2020 of the 21 century will be remembered as the year of the pandemic. As the year ended and just when everyone was thinking the worst was over, new infections with another strain of the virus appeared in India. The second wave involving the Delta virus began in March 2021, peaked in April and slowly eased by July leaving behind a devastating effect in terms of loss of lives and productivity. Samarth was involved in a couple of Covid related studies during the first wave which sought to understand the myths and misconceptions about the infection as well as the vaccines that had been brought into the market. We were happy to note that the Government intensified Social Behavioural Communication activities during the second wave. As a result of these activities carried out during the second wave many people in the community understood the value of the vaccine and volunteered to get themselves vaccinated. India's vaccination rate thus increased appreciably. With the gradual easing of the second wave in India and across the world, people also began to learn to live with the virus, thereby enabling businesses and other operations to recover slowly.

At Samarth we began to look for other opportunities to collaborate and start our research studies. We entered into a new collaboration with Balaji Dental College and hospital. The study led by Dr. Badri Thiruvenkatachari was on testing an intervention for babies born with unilateral cleft lip palette (CLP). Designed as a randomized control trial, the study also has a qualitative research component that aims to explore the understanding of and psychological challenges faced by parents of babies born with CLP. Experts in qualitative research methods from Samarth will be carrying out this component of the study over a five year period. We completed a pilot study with a small number of parents which helped us to design the qualitative approach pre and post intervention. We are excited and feel proud to be conducting the study as this is the first qualitative study with parents of babies with CLP to be carried out in India. This mixed methods study will help develop a care and support model for families who have a child born with CLP.

Two other studies that Samarth is engaged in, is in the field of mental health, which is very close to our hearts! We entered into a collaboration with Dr. Gregory Armstrong, a Senior research Fellow at the University of Melbourne and Dr. Lakshmi Vijayakumar, psychiatrist and founder of Sneha, an NGO dedicated to suicide prevention. Suicide is a major public health problem in India and Tamil Nadu happens to be a state with a high prevalence of suicides in the country. Studies have shown that media reporting of suicide could influence public awareness and attitudes about suicides and its prevention. This study aims to test an intervention to reduce suicidal ideation through changing the narration of suicide content in the print medium. As a first step we carried out the cultural adaptation and validation of four scales that measure different aspects about suicide which had been developed in the west. These scales measure the constructs related to literacy about suicide, attitudes about suicide and stigma related to suicide. Cultural validation of the scales is a long and iterative process including many steps beginning with translation of the scales to the local language, establishing face and content validity and estimating reliability of the scales. We are happy to report that translations of all the scales into Tamil and assessments of face and content validity with the support of mental health experts in Chennai have been completed. We are in the process of undertaking the reliability estimates of the scales involving assessments of Cronbach's Alpha and test- re-test reliability.

Another interesting work that has been sub-contracted to us by the Schizophrenia Research Foundation (SCARF) and CitiesRise is a study that seeks to understand how young people in low and middle income countries connect with mental health science. Samarth's role is to oversee the conduct and analysis of the qualitative component which includes training and mentoring of the field teams across 4 countries to carry out interviews; developing study guides, analysing the India site data and carrying out cross country comparisons. This has been an enriching experience particularly as it involved comparing the mental health journey of young people in the India site with those of young people in other LMIC countries, namely South Africa, Rwanda and Kenya. We found that there were a lot of similarities across the cultures of these four countries.

We also continue to hold our virtual training workshops in Social Science research methods and analysis and are proud to say that we conducted a total of eight such training programmes during this period. Despite the online nature of the sessions, participants showed a lot of enthusiasm and eagerness to learn. I am happy to share our activities for the period 2022-23 and pray that we continue to engage in work that gives us satisfaction and enables our personal growth

Thanks to all our governing body & advisory board members and our auditors for your continued support and guidance.

Looking forward to the next year !