MEANING OF PARTICIPATION

There is a caveat here. Participation is often a misunderstood term. There is a need to define the term in the present framework. In some or the other form, the notion of participation has always been there in population policy. In the past also population policy suggested making family planning a people's movement but it was just pretence to impose the elite perspective of population on people. Participation of people was seen either as consultative participation , in which people were supposed to come to clinics and get counselling and services, or functional in which participation was seen as a means to achieve the project goals. There is a need to go for interactive participation in which people participate in joint analysis, development of action plans, group decision making, and move towards self-mobilization ( Jennings , 2004). This also entails understanding of social representations of family and health at the community level.

Under the aegis of participatory model social scientists must try to unearth the meanings and social representations of life and social processes and the role of family size (number of children) in this. Health psychologists have already done pioneering work in the field of social representations of health, and social scientists working on population and development issues may benefit immensely from the works of such health psychologists (Murray et al. 2003; Herzlich, 1973; Herzlich and Pierret, 1987; Moscovici, 2000). These studies will show that social representations of reproductive health are fluid and are intertwined with social arrangements in society. For example, Bhatia and Cleland (2008) found that anxiety, stress and overwork may be associated with reported gynaecological morbidity among poor urban women. According to NSSO data (NSSO, 2006) as many as 50 percent spells of ailments in urban areas remained untreated because they were not considered to be serious. Modernization and post-modernization have posed challenges to traditional culture and demographers need to understand its full implications for finding ways of development of various communities and classes.