SBE-RCUK: The Effects of Mobile Phones on Gendered Social Networks, Decision Making, and Vulnerability

Virginia Polytechnic Institute And State University, Blacksburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

This project will examine how mobile phones may empower or disempower vulnerable groups in rural communities, especially women. It will provide early research on the effects of mobile technologies on social empowerment and vulnerability in traditionally hierarchical societies. It will also help to develop existing theories of natural resource-based, subsistence livelihoods by incorporating perspectives from social network analysis and gender studies to better account for dynamics within and across households. Findings from this research will be presented in various formats to participant communities, local development NGOs, elementary school children and graduate students to promote greater awareness of how social networks and mobile technologies affect each other, how these effects vary for different individuals and groups, and how vulnerability is contextual. The project will also support interdisciplinary graduate education in the U.S. and improve international social science data infrastructure. This award is made under the SBE-RCUK Lead Agency Agreement. This project is embedded in a larger research context concerned with the rapid spread of mobile information and communication technologies (ICTs). Mobile phones especially have been heralded as transformative new tools to reduce global poverty. Scholars and development professionals alike have pointed out that phones can greatly reduce barriers to information, promote market efficiency, boost savings and expedite emergency response. An alternative perspective is that phones can magnify situations rather than transform them. In some contexts, phones have not been shown to improve communication, leading scholars to ask which lives may be transformed and which may not? Valuable tools may be less valuable to people who are not well positioned in society like minorities, women, or the poor. These concerns are especially prevalent in developing countries where poverty is common and social positioning is hierarchical with gender, age, and wealth serving as important drivers of access, influence and power. Furthermore, in rural areas telecommunications infrastructure can be patchy, access to resources like health care can be stochastic, and environmental shocks like droughts can be devastating. To address how phones may transform some lives and simply reproduce others, this project will use mixed qualitative and quantitative methodologies to examine how phones affect women's and men's social networks, access to information and decision making, and capacities to respond to shocks within several pastoralist Maasai communities in northern Tanzania over a three-year period. Key hypotheses include: (1) men's and women's social networks will be affected differently by mobile phones; and (2) women's access to household decision making will significantly affect tradeoffs between individual and household vulnerabilities.