Accerenzi Michela, Brañas-Garza Pablo, Jorrat Diego
Fundación ETEA - Development Institute of Universidad Loyola Andalucía, Córdoba, Spain.
Loyola Behavioral Lab, Universidad Loyola Andalucía, Córdoba, Spain.
Arch Public Health. 2023 Feb 10;81(1):20. doi: 10.1186/s13690-023-01030-5.
Access to accurate, timely and age-appropriate information about menarche is an essential part of menstrual health. Reliable evidence shows that girls primarily obtain information from their mothers and/or other female family members, therefore, it is important to determine parents' knowledge and their predictions about other parents' knowledge of the age of menarche.
To this end, we performed a pre-registered study with data collected from 360 households in Santa Rosa de Copán, Honduras. We implemented a novel procedure to avoid social desirability bias whereby participants answered two separated questions: i) their knowledge about the age of menarche (self-report) and ii) to predict or guess the modal response of the other participants regarding the same question (modal guess). Participants were paid according to accuracy. Both questions appeared randomly in the survey.
Recent studies indicate the age of menarche at 12 years old and 56.11% of the sample gave the same response while 62.78% hit the modal value. We estimated the impact of different sociodemographic variables and found only marginal differences. Interestingly, people with formal education and women tend to respond with lower predictions.
Parents' knowledge about the age of menarche is high in the study area. The study also found that there was no social desirability bias.
获取准确、及时且适合年龄的初潮信息是月经健康的重要组成部分。可靠证据表明，女孩主要从母亲和/或其他女性家庭成员那里获取信息，因此，确定父母对初潮年龄的了解以及他们对其他父母这方面知识的预测很重要。
为此，我们进行了一项预先注册的研究，收集了洪都拉斯科潘省圣罗莎360户家庭的数据。我们采用了一种新颖的程序来避免社会期望偏差，即让参与者回答两个分开的问题：i）他们对初潮年龄的了解（自我报告）和ii）预测或猜测其他参与者对同一问题的典型回答（典型猜测）。参与者根据回答的准确性获得报酬。这两个问题在调查中随机出现。
近期研究表明初潮年龄为12岁，56.11%的样本给出了相同回答，62.78%的人猜对了典型值。我们估计了不同社会人口统计学变量的影响，仅发现了微小差异。有趣的是，受过正规教育的人和女性的预测往往较低。
研究区域内父母对初潮年龄的了解程度较高。该研究还发现不存在社会期望偏差。
