Because home environments are socially constructed, household tastes reflect and reinforce class hierarchies, as well as gender-based, racial, ethnic, sexual, and national differences.
ASHAs deliver services in the same catchment areas (population of 1,000) as the AWWs, and receive performance-based incentives for promoting universal immunization, motivating pregnant women to have institutional deliveries, referring clients to Reproductive & Child Health (RCH) and other health care programs, and constructing household toilets.
The Indian government's Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan scheme, which is specifically designed to end outdoor defecation by building toilets for families, provides a reimbursement ranging from $170 to $250 per family to construct a household toilet.
The socio-economic status of households was assessed by constructing a household wealth index based on household asset ownership, level of education of the head of household and household characteristics, as proposed and validated by Filmer (44).
Since DHS do not collect data on income or expenditures, the economic status of household is proxied by a household wealth variable constructed from household possessions and amenities and dwelling characteristics, using principal component analysis [ 33].
We utilized IKONOS satellite imagery to construct the household geographic information systems (GIS) database of the study area [ 19].
The first component, which accounted for 16%% variation captures the greatest variation in the original variables and was used to represent the assumed underlying construct of household wealth.
Scoring factors were derived from the first principal component, which was a linear index of variables with common information, and this score was used to construct the household's asset index.
