A Life Course Framework to Measure Women's Status: Lessons learned from Iraq Woman Integrated Social and Health Survey (I-WISH)

Quantifying women social and health status through data collection from household surveys is a key step to measure and monitor the achievements of development objective and MDGs. There are a number of robust survey tools to measure women status in the reproductive age, and few attempts to collect information about adolescence, menopause and elderly stages of women life in an integrated life course context. There is also evidence that a life course approach would provide an outstanding opportunity to understand the interaction across life stages and the impact of knowledge, perception and behavior in one stage on the consequent stages. While the literature introduced a theoretical framework on the lifecycle approach it lacked operational framework to serve an effective woman-centered development programs. This paper sheds lights on the insights of life course approach, and utilizes the lessons learned from Iraq Integrated Women Health and Social Status (I-WISH). It provides empirical evidence on the importance and value added for introducing a lifecycle survey tool, and points out the technical difficulties to develop such a tool. It calls for more effort to develop such a tool kit for the sake of further development in the field of the social research on women lifecycle health and social status.