Monthly Archives: March 2012

17 Mar

Relationship between desire to migrate and trust in government

Recently Armenian political figure Vartan Oskanian joined Twitter. He tweeted a speech that he gave where  he claimed that lack of trust in government is a cause of migration in Armenia.

Thanks to him for giving me a hypothesis to test!

Using the preliminary 2011 Caucasus Barometer, I looked at the relationship between desire to temporarily or permanently migrate and trust in government. And guess what? Oskanian is right!

For those that want to short-term migrate, they are statistically significantly less likely to trust these institutions than those that do not want to short-term migrate:

education system, army, courts, parliament, president, media, and the church.

Desire to short-term migrate had no effect on trust in these institutions:

healthcare, banks, NGOs, Prime Minster, police, local government, ombudsman, EU, and UN.

And for those that are interested in permanently migrating, it gets even more interesting.

Those with a desire to permanently migrate were statistically significantly less trusting in these institutions:

healthcare system, banks, education system, army, court system, NGOs, parliament, Prime Minister, president, police, media, local government, church, and ombudsman.

There was no impact on trust in the EU or UN.

So, yeah… this is interesting!

For more on who wants to migrate, check this out from 2010. Also I have a paper on trust in the government in Armenia here.

14 Mar

Networked Authoritarianism and Social Media in Azerbaijan

Networked Authoritarianism and Social Media in Azerbaijan is an article by myself and Sarah Kendzior about Azerbaijan and Internet control.

Here is the abstract. (Translation via Google translate.) And here is the link to the study. (Contact me if you need a copy because of lack of library access.)

English:

The diffusion of digital media does not always have democratic consequences. This mixed-methods study examines how the government of Azerbaijan dissuaded Internet users from political activism. We examine how digital media were used for networked authoritarianism, a form of Internet control common in former Soviet states where manipulation over digitally mediated social networks is used more than outright censorship. Through a content analysis of 3 years of Azerbaijani media, a 2-year structural equation model of the relationship between Internet use and attitudes toward protest, and interviews with Azerbaijani online activists, we find that the government has successfully dissuaded frequent Internet users from supporting protest and average Internet users from using social media for political purposes.

Azerbaijani:

Digital media diffuziya hər zaman demokratik nəticələr yoxdur. Bu qarışıq-metodların öyrənilməsi Azərbaycan hökuməti siyasi aktivliyi İnternet istifadəçiləri dissuaded inceliyor. Biz digital media ağ avtoritarizmi, digital aracılıklı sosial şəbəkələr üzərində manipulyasiya açıq senzura daha çox istifadə olunur, orada keçmiş Sovet dövlətləri ümumi Internet nəzarət formasında istifadə necə yoxlamaq. Azərbaycan media, internet istifadəsi və etiraz münasibət arasında bir 2-il struktur tənlik model və Azərbaycan online fəalları ilə müsahibə 3 il tərkibi analiz etməklə, biz hökumətin uğurla etiraz dəstək olan tez-tez İnternet istifadəçiləri dissuaded ki tapmaq və siyasi məqsədlər üçün sosial media istifadə orta İnternet istifadəçiləri.

Russian:

Распространение цифровых носителей не всегда демократическими последствиями. Это смешанные методы исследования рассматриваются как правительство Азербайджана отговорили пользователей Интернета от политической активности. Мы рассмотрим, как цифровые медиа были использованы для сетевой авторитаризм, формы контроля интернет распространен в бывших советских республиках, где манипуляции над цифровым опосредованной социальной сети используется более чем откровенная цензура. С помощью контент-анализа 3-х лет азербайджанские СМИ, 2-летняя модель структурного уравнения связи между использованием интернета и отношения к протеста, а также интервью с азербайджанскими активистами в Интернете, мы обнаружили, что правительство успешно отговорил частых интернет-пользователей от поддержки протеста и обычных пользователей Интернета от использования социальных медиа в политических целях.

14 Mar

Armenian ICT adoption – updated

Images from my #ictd2012 poster, plus some updates on April 1.

Some fun bits:

– 37% of Armenians have used the Internet — that’s some major growth, as you can see on slide 2.

– And Armenians are using the Internet more often. 22% of Armenians are online daily and 8% are online weekly. Big increases from the past few years.

– Those that are NOT online are more likely to be rural, poorer, less educated, and older — but when they were asked, most said that they didn’t get online because they don’t have a computer, followed by a lack of interest or need.

– From the original post  I have the PC, mobile, and home Internet connection data from the Caucasus Barometer, the ITU, and Gallup. Based on methodology, I give the most weight to the Caucasus Barometer, but I figured that it’d be interesting to see how the three measure up.

In the next few days I’ll post online activities and some demographic breakdowns. As always, if you have questions, I’m happy to do some analysis for you. And, please link back to this post and/or give the proper attribution if you use these stats. This is the result of many hours of analysis and I appreciate your respect for my intellectual labor and property.

Armenia ict adoption ii

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Armenia ICT Adoption by Katy Pearce is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.katypearce.net.

13 Mar

Where do Armenians get online?

I’m at the #ictd2012 conference right now and I’ve been asked about Armenian Internet use. Business Internet use is actually quite low, especially compared to household use. This surprises a lot of people.

So I did a quick analysis to find out where Armenians get online most often. (This is rough 2011 Caucasus Barometer — will revise if different in the final version.) And this is of ALL Armenians.

19% of all Armenians get online at home.

3% on a friend’s computer.

2% at work.

2% via the mobile.

1% at an Internet cafe.

07 Mar

Georgian Women in 2011

Happy International Women’s Day.

This month I’m going to share initial early analysis of the 2011 Caucasus Barometer that focuses on women. The first set is Georgia.

This is early data, so there is a possibility of error. I apologize in advance if there is and will update this blog post if any errors are found.

Also, I’ve had some issues with my analysis, graphics, and slides being re-appropriated. Please respect the hours of work that I’ve put into this and attribute properly by linking to this blog post, including my @katypearce name on Twitter, or any other suitable form of attribution.

Findings:

– Georgian women’s life satisfaction is fairly normally distributed.
– And more Georgian women are happy than not happy.
– Religion is very important to many Georgian women.

– In terms of values, the majority of Georgian women do not believe that it is justified to engage in many forms of “cheating.” Two-thirds of Georgian women believe that it is never justified to have an abortion (despite the abortion rate being quite high). 71% of Georgian women do not believe that it is ever justified to be a homosexual.

– Many Georgian women want large families.

– Georgian women’s PERSONAL monthly income is on average about US$100. However, this is only one part of a total family income, so do not extrapolate household income from this.

– Over a third of Georgian women are interested in temporary migrant, while much less are interested in permanent migration. Half of Georgian women have a family member living abroad.

– 17% of Georgian women played a video game in the last 6 months!
– 10% of Georgian women volunteered in the last 6 months.
– 19% of Georgian women use the Internet daily – mostly for information seeking and social networking sites.
– But nearly two-thirds of Georgian women have NO computer skills.

– More Georgian women think that politics are going in the right direction than the wrong direction, although there are mixed opinions about how the government treats people.
– 86% of Georgian women would vote in a presidential election and over two-thirds would vote for a woman!

As always, if anyone is interested, I’m happy to do breakdowns by age, region, education level, or whatever on any of these.

I hope to post the Armenian and Azerbaijani women’s results in the coming weeks.

Happy International Woman’s Day!

Georgian women

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Georgian Women 2011: Early analysis from the 2011 Caucasus Barometer by Katy Pearce is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.katypearce.net.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.katypearce.net/cv/georgia.