This website contains two tools designed to assess menstrual practices:
1) The Menstrual Practice Needs Scale (MPNS-36) is a set of self-report questions that provides a quantitative measure of the extent to which respondents’ menstrual management practices and environments were perceived to meet their needs during their last period. It asks about perceptions of comfort, satisfaction, adequacy, reliability as well as worries and concerns during the last menstrual period and can be used for needs assessment in baseline or cross-sectional investigations, or for programme evaluation, to monitor differences in experience over time or between groups.
2) The Menstrual Practices Questionnaire (MPQ) provides a set of best practice self-report questions to capture respondents’ menstrual hygiene practices. Questions can be selected to fit research needs and can, for example, be used for needs assessments, to describe a population and to consider external validity, or to track changes in behaviours over time.
Who is it for? Menstrual Health and Hygiene (MHH) practitioners and researchers
Why is it valuable? These two practical monitoring tools – one quantitative and one qualitative – can be used by practitioners and researchers as they are (or with little adaptation). They can be used as part of formative research to understand women and girls’ MHH needs, as well as to monitor changes over time. Developed based on robust research and testing, they provide an alternative (or addition) to UNICEF’s MHH monitoring guidance.
(Website accessed 9th August 2021)
