Design Tool: Formative Research with Mothers

A guide to conducting design research with mothers and mothers-in-law of adolescent girls. This guide illustrates our use of formative, human-centered design research to generate insights that our team later analyzed as a group from the perspectives of our various disciplines: adolescent developmental science, socio-cultural anthropology, youth engagement, public health, and social marketing.

We shared more research methods than we needed during any one conversation. Providing a variety of suggested tools for how critical topics can be explored gave our teams the flexibility to choose which methods were most appropriate for their audience. At the end of every day, we reconvened to discuss insights, so we could learn and refine our approach. Note: We used this process in all three countries, though the example shared here is from our Ethiopia team.