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

该项目将研究移动的电话如何增强或削弱农村社区弱势群体，特别是妇女的权能。它将提供关于移动的技术对传统等级社会的社会赋权和脆弱性的影响的早期研究。它还将有助于发展现有的基于自然资源的生计理论，纳入社会网络分析和性别研究的观点，以更好地说明家庭内部和家庭之间的动态。这项研究的结果将以各种形式呈现给参与社区、当地发展非政府组织、小学生和研究生，以促进人们更好地认识社交网络和移动的技术如何相互影响，这些影响如何对不同的个人和群体产生影响，以及脆弱性如何与环境相关。该项目还将支持美国的跨学科研究生教育，并改善国际社会科学数据基础设施。该奖项是根据SBE-RCUK牵头机构协议授予的。该项目嵌入了与移动的信息和通信技术（ICT）快速传播有关的更大研究背景。特别是移动的电话被誉为减少全球贫困的变革性新工具。学者和发展专业人士都指出，手机可以大大减少信息障碍，提高市场效率，增加储蓄，加快应急反应。另一种观点是，手机可以放大情况，而不是改变它们。在某些情况下，手机并没有被证明可以改善沟通，这导致学者们问，哪些生活可能会改变，哪些可能不会？有价值的工具对于那些在社会中地位不高的人来说可能不那么有价值，比如少数民族、妇女或穷人。这些问题在发展中国家尤其普遍，因为在这些国家，贫穷是普遍现象，社会地位是分等级的，性别、年龄和财富是获取机会、影响力和权力的重要驱动因素。此外，在农村地区，电信基础设施可能参差不齐，获得医疗保健等资源可能是随机的，干旱等环境冲击可能是毁灭性的。为了解决手机如何改变某些人的生活和简单地复制另一些人的生活的问题，该项目将使用定性和定量相结合的方法，研究手机如何影响妇女和男子的社交网络、获取信息和决策的机会，以及三年内坦桑尼亚北方几个马赛游牧社区应对冲击的能力。关键假设包括：（1）男性和女性的社交网络将受到移动的电话的不同影响;（2）女性参与家庭决策将对个人和家庭脆弱性之间的权衡产生重大影响。

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.