PS – on trust in Azerbaijan
As a quick follow up to this post, here are the frequencies of trust in various groups in Azerbaijan from the 2012 social capital and media CRRC study. No comparisons exist for the other countries.
08
Apr
Monthly Archives: April 2014
08
Apr
Trust and Relying on Others in the Caucasus
I’m working on a project right now that looks at trust, so I wanted to share some results from the 2013 Caucasus Barometer.
Here’s some work on trust from 2012. And more from the EBRD Life in Transitions study.
First, the generalized trust question – there is scholarly debate about how people interpret this question, but it seems like many people think that this means other people in the street and thus is tied up with sense of safety.
In this case, Armenians are the least trusting, Georgians the most. (In an ANOVA, all these differences reported here are statistically significant).
But then when people are asked about their family/friends/neighbors helping, things change.
In all of these, Azerbaijanis are far less likely to believe that their family/friends/whomever would help them.
Without a doubt, “help” isn’t the same as trust, but it does say something about being able to rely on others for help. And it looks like there are some very different patterns in these states.
01
Apr
Facebook in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia
Number of Facebook users in the Caucasus is a popular topic. I did this analysis with data from Facebook itself.
From the 2013 Caucasus Barometer, we see that 20% of Armenian adults, 16% of Azerbaijani adults, and 26% of Georgian adults use Facebook at least once a week. (Also provided are the percentages out of Internet users.) This matches up pretty well with the Facebook information that had the following for those older than 14 in the countries: Armenia: 25%, Azerbaijan: 19%, and Georgia: 34%.
The Caucasus Barometer also asked about number of friends. This is always difficult because people aren’t sitting at their computers/phones and often have a hard time estimating.
The Caucasus Barometer asked about most frequent Facebook activities this year. See the chart above. I would have loved to have seen all activities asked about separately, as it is hard to really pin down one activity on Facebook, but oh well.
Interestingly, newsfeed reading is the most popular activity in Armenia and Georgia, whereas there is much greater variance in Azerbaijan. I suspect that the variance is due to the use of Facebook as a “free”(ish) space for deliberation in Azerbaijan whereas in Armenia and Georgia there are other places for free discussion.
