Publications by authors named "Aimee Benson"

Each year, nearly 300,000 women and 5 million fetuses or neonates die during childbirth or shortly thereafter, a burden concentrated disproportionately in low- and middle-income countries. Identifying women and their fetuses at risk for intrapartum-related morbidity and death could facilitate early intervention. The Limiting Adverse Birth Outcomes in Resource-Limited Settings (LABOR) Study is a multi-country, prospective, observational cohort designed to exhaustively document the course and outcomes of labor, delivery, and the immediate postpartum period in settings where adverse outcomes are frequent.

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Objectives: This paper presents the impact of key components of the Senegal Urban Reproductive Health Initiative, including radio, television, community-based activities, Muslim religious-leader engagement and service quality improvement on modern contraceptive use by all women and the sub-sample of poor women.

Study Design: This study uses baseline (2011) and endline (2015) longitudinal data from a representative sample of urban women first surveyed in 2011 to examine the impact of the Initiative's demand- and supply-side activities on modern contraceptive use.

Results: By endline, there was increased exposure to radio and television programming, religious leaders speaking favorably about contraception, and community-based initiatives.

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Context: Levels of fertility and contraceptive use have long fluctuated in Kenya. The multicomponent Tupange program, part of the Urban Reproductive Health Initiative, was initiated in 2011 to increase use of modern family planning methods.

Methods: Women aged 15-49 in the five Kenyan cities where Tupange was implemented were interviewed in 2010 and reinterviewed in 2014 to obtain information on their contraceptive use and exposure to components of the Tupange program.

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Objectives: The Urban Health Initiative (UHI) was initiated in 2009 with the goal of increasing family planning (FP) use among the poor in urban areas of Uttar Pradesh, India. The Measurement, Learning & Evaluation project (MLE) was tasked with rigorous impact evaluation of the UHI. This paper presents the impact evaluation findings of the UHI program.

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Background: More needs to be known about the role intra-familial power dynamics play in women's reproductive health outcomes, particularly in societies like Northern India characterized by patriarchy and extended families. The key research question we explore is: how important are living arrangements (e.g.

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Purpose: The aim of the study was to describe the mode, frequency, duration, and intensity of physical activity among pregnant women, to explore whether these women reached the recommended levels of activity, and to explore how these patterns changed during pregnancy.

Methods: This study, as part of the third phase of the Pregnancy, Infection, and Nutrition Study, investigated physical activity among 1482 pregnant women. A recall of the different modes, frequency, duration, and intensity of physical activity during the past week was assessed in two telephone interviews at 17-22 and 27-30 wk of gestation.

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Measures of HIV/AIDS knowledge and risk perception are important because they are often linked to behavioral change both in theory and in practice. This study examines knowledge and risk perception by assessing their relationship with demographic characteristics, first source of HIV/AIDS information, and behavioral and cognitive risk exposures among men and women in a rural district of Malawi. The data come from a panel study of 940 women aged 15-34 years and 661 men aged 20-44 years.

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The ability of organisms to time and coordinate temporal sequences of events and to select particular aspects of their internal and external environments to which they will attend is vital to the organism's ability to adapt to the world around them. Numerous psychological theories have been proposed that describe how organisms might accomplish such stimulus selection and represent discrete temporal events as well as rhythm production. In addition, a large number of studies have demonstrated that damage to the frontostriatal circuitry appears to compromise the ability of organisms to successfully shift attention and behavior to adapt to changing temporal contexts.

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