RAPID: Collaborative Research: Technology Adoption during Environmental Jolts: Mobile Phone Use and Digital Services Appropriation during India's Demonetization Crisis

偶尔，危机或新法律等事件会迫使人们在日常生活中使用的技术发生快速变化。 这些冲击往往引起人们对人们获得和使用这些新技术的能力的担忧，以及他们对支持这些技术的基础设施的压力。 该提案研究了印度最近取消某些货币流通的政策决定所引起的罕见的“自然实验”的影响，这导致突然大规模推动使用数字化工具管理货币。 该研究团队计划与印度的学生、商人和视力障碍者合作，解决两个主要问题：（1）如何采用和调整基于电话的支付等金融技术，以应对新的法律的要求;（2）使用给定技术的可用性、可用性和必要性如何相互作用，以塑造其成功。 更好地理解金融体系的社会和技术要素如何适应这一冲击，将促进我们对技术基础设施的总体理解，并为金融、教育和技术经验资源有限的情况下的可访问技术和技术设计提供信息。在印度研究这一点将为希望进入印度市场或已经在印度开展业务的美国公司提供重要的见解，该项目还将提供跨越知识和国界的教育经验，这将有助于培养多元化和具有全球竞争力的STEM劳动力。和基础设施研究，该项目将更好地了解人们如何在被迫或确定性的情况下适应技术。该团队将研究和比较三种不同的用户群体：1）大学生; 2）在非正规部门工作的人; 3）视力障碍者。 选择这些人群是为了突出更广泛人群的不同方面：大学生对现金经济的依赖程度较低，受教育程度较高;非正规经济部门的人更依赖现金，受教育程度较低;视力障碍者可能因不必处理现金而获得交易利益，但也必须克服主流技术的不可用性。该研究将采用两阶段计划，首先进行访谈，以捕捉细微差别，并告知可以在第二个调查阶段提出的问题;该团队计划进行两次研究，一次是在前6个月，另一次是在为期一年的项目的最后3个月（基于第一轮的改进），以捕捉相对新鲜和纵向的震动体验。 利用与支付提供商，视障群体和非正式工人的现有关系，研究人员将研究人们使用的支付技术的生态系统，其特定设计如何影响人们使用它们的能力，以及他们的社交网络如何支持（通过中介）和影响（通过网络效应）他们可以使用这些技术的方式。这将为理解和改善边缘化社区的创新和技术使用提供经验教训，这些经验教训可能会转移到其他情况下，例如快速采用移动的健康应用程序和在自然灾害情况下使用技术。

Occasionally, events such as crises or new laws force a rapid change in the technologies people use in their daily lives. These jolts often raise concerns about peoples' access to and ability to use these new technologies, and about the stress they put on the infrastructure that supports them. This proposal studies the impacts of a rare "natural experiment" caused by the recent policy decision in India to remove certain currency from circulation, which is leading to a sudden and massive push toward the use of digital tools for managing money. The research team plans to work with students, businesspeople, and people with visual impairments in India to address two main questions: (1) how financial technologies such as phone-based payments are adopted and adapted to respond to new legal requirements; and (2) how the usability, availability, and necessity of using a given technology interact to shape its success. Better understanding of how the social and technical elements of the financial system adapt to this jolt will advance our understanding of technology infrastructures in general and inform the design of accessible technologies and technologies for contexts where financial, educational, and technology experience resources are limited. Studying this in India will provide important insights for U.S. companies looking to enter the Indian market or already operating there, and will also offer key insights on prospects and challenges in broadening the cashless economy in the U.S. The project will also provide educational experiences that cross both intellectual and national borders that will help train a diverse and globally competitive STEM workforce.Based on an integration of ICTD and infrastructure studies, this project will develop better understanding of how people adapt to technology in forced or deterministic contexts. The team will study and compare three different user populations: 1) college students; 2) people working in the informal sector; and 3) people with visual impairments. These populations were chosen to highlight different aspects of the broader population: college students are less reliant on the cash economy and more educated; those in the informal sector are more cash-reliant and less educated; and those with visual impairments may gain transactional benefits from not having to handle cash, but also have to overcome inaccessibility of mainstream technology. The research will employ a two-stage plan that starts with interviews to capture nuance and inform questions that can be asked in a second, survey stage; the team plans to conduct the research twice, once in the first 6 months and again (with improvements based on the first round) in the last 3 months of the year-long project, to capture both relatively fresh and longitudinal experiences of the jolt. Leveraging existing relationships with payment providers, visually impaired groups, and informal workers, the researchers will study the ecosystem of payment technologies people use, the ways their specific design affects people's ability to use them, and how their social network both supports (through intermediation) and affects (through network effects) the ways they can use those technologies. This will provide lessons for understanding and improving innovation and technology use in marginalized communities, lessons that may transfer to other contexts such as the rapid adoption of mobile health apps and the use of technology in natural disaster situations.