Katy Pearce - Adventures in Research

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

View more PowerPoint from Katy Pearce

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

View more presentations from Katy Pearce.

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.

10 Jan

What do Armenians do on social networking sites?

Kazakhstan Internet

With all of the activity in Kazakhstan right now, I wanted to pull some findings from a conference paper/ article in submission about Central Asian Internet. (I can’t post the entire paper while it is still in submission – sorry!) If you have questions or are interested in more detailed analysis, contact me and I’d be happy to do what I can.

Here’s Kazakh Internet penetration according to the ITU (which frequent readers know I’m not a fan of because it uses the telecom companies’ information to determine adoption):

Internet Adopters (% of population that have ever used) (ITU Development Index, 2011)
2004	2.65%
2005	2.96%
2006	3.27%
2007	4.02%
2008	11.00%
2009	18.20%
2010	34.00%

And here’s the data from the paper, national, from spring 2011:

Aware of Internet	80%
Of total, Adopted Internet	50%
Of total, Use Internet
Never	66%
Less than monthly	2%
Monthly	3%
Weekly	10%
Daily	19%

In all of my work I emphasize the importance of ‘frequent use’ as a more salient category of Internet use than ‘ever’ used.

FINDINGS:

In our paper, we model antecedents to Internet awareness, adoption (ever used), and frequent use.

In Kazakhstan, the strongest determinants (in order from strongest) of AWARENESS that the Internet exists were: age, urbanness, education, and economic wellbeing (although economic wellbeing wasn’t strong – statistically significant, but not as strong as the others). (This model explained 13% of the variance in awareness.)

In plain English this means that younger people, more urban people, those with more education, and those with more wealth are more likely to be in the 80% that know what the Internet is.

The strongest determinants (in order from strongest) of ADOPTION (ever having used) were age, economic wellbeing, urbanness, and education. (And this model was set up to control for the effect of these variables on awareness first…) (This model explained 33% of the variance in Internet adoption.)

In plain English this means that younger people, wealthier people, more urban people, and those with more education are more likely to be in the 50% that have ever used the Internet.

The strongest determinants (in order from strongest) of FREQUENT USE were age, urbannesses, and education. Economic wellbeing wasn’t a significant factor, but I’d imagine that the economic barrier exists more at the ‘ever used’ stage and once you’ve gotten over that, frequent use isn’t as much of a cost issue. (This model explained (a whopping!) 49% of the variance in use. (This is really high.))

In plain English this means that younger people, more urban people, and those with more education are more likely to be in the 29% that use the Internet frequently (at least weekly).

So what are Kazakhs doing online?

Of those that are online at least weekly, 85% do email, 77% read news (as a side note, this is quite high compared to what I’ve found in my work in the rest of Central Asia and the Caucasus), 73% are on social networking sites (this is normal compared to the Caucasus) (47% on Odnoklassniki, 43% on vKontake, 14% on Facebook, 7% on Twitter), ~40% interact with blogs (this is very high compared to the rest of Central Asia and the Caucasus), and 23% watch YouTube.

Access points vary. 2/3rd get online via the own PC, most at home (60% of frequent users). Public places are less common that home — 44% at work, 33% at school, 33% at a cafe on a public computer, 35% at a cafe with their own laptop. Mobile Internet is used by 55% of frequent users.

For what it is worth, the Kazakhstan Internet landscape is very different from the rest of Central Asia and the Caucasus — demographically and in the activities engaged in.

05 Dec

Regional differences in mean of accessing the Internet

Based on data from the Armenian Media landscape report, here are the regional breakdowns of means of accessing the Internet in Armenia (in early 2011).

You can see that for the country as a whole, most Internet users are personal computer based – although mobile is not insignificant. In the capital, PC dominates, but for rural users, mobile is catching up to PC. And those mobile users are often NEW users.

In an upcoming study we discuss how much the way people access the Internet influences what they actually do once they’re online as well as the demographic differences between those that use a PC and those that use a mobile phone as their primary Internet access device.

This is the entire country.

This is Yerevan.

This is regional cities.

This is rural areas.

(All images by Janine Slaker)

OF ALL ARMENIAN INTERNET USERS	Total	Yerevan	Regional city	Rural
	N = 420	N = 215	N = 145	N = 60
Mobile Internet access	15%	10%	19%	28%
PC-based Internet access	71%	73%	77%	62%
Both mobile and PC based Internet access	11%	17%	4%	10%

OF ALL ARMENIANS	Total	Yerevan	Regional city	Rural
	N = 1420	N = 504	N = 443	N = 473
No Internet access	70%	57%	67%	87%
Mobile Internet access	5%	4%	6%	4%
PC-based Internet access	22%	31%	25%	8%
Both mobile and PC based Internet access	3%	7%	1%	1%

18 Aug

English language proficiency in the Caucasus

I’m working on a project right now looking at the relationship between English language proficiency and Internet use in the Caucasus.

Although wandering around Yerevan, Baku, or Tbilisi might tell you something different, English language proficiency in these countries is actually quite low.

Between 1-4% of the population considers themselves “advanced” in the English language and two-thirds to three-quarters have no proficiency whatsoever.

And despite conventional wisdom, it looks like there hasn’t been much growth in English proficiency since Caucasus Barometer started measuring it in 2007. And in Azerbaijan it seems to have gone down a little bit (out migration?).

What are the demographic characteristics that predict English language proficiency?

First, one’s education level (standardized beta .30) is the stronger predictor of English language proficiency.

Next is one’s urbanness. The more urban you are (capital, regional city, rural area), the more likely you are to know English (standardized beta .15).

Then one’s material deprivation (which means wealth/poverty). The wealthier you are, the more likely you are to know English (standardized beta .13).

Finally, gender matters. Women are more likely to know English (there is a lot of research on this and isn’t surprising) (standardized beta .07).

Age didn’t matter at all.

English

View more presentations from Katy Pearce.

11 Aug

Summary of all economic wellbeing posts – Poverty in the Caucasus

Since I posted a lot of analyses on economic wellbeing in the Caucasus, I thought that I’d put links to them all in one post.

Overall, I hope that this gives people a better sense of what dire poverty exists in all three states. If pressed, I’d say that based on these analyses, Georgia is doing the worst overall and Azerbaijan is doing the best. But without a doubt, there are more similarities in poverty in these three neighbors than there are differences.

Consumption ability
Consumption ability by capital/urban/rural
New consumption 2012

Income sources
Income distribution

Ownership of consumer goods

Food expenses
Borrowing money to buy food

Utilities

Debt and savings

Sanitation

Please feel free to ask questions or requests for further analysis.

11 Aug

What are the sources of income in the Caucasus?

So where do people in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia get the money that they need to live?

For most households, the primary source of income comes from a paid salary (43% in Armenia, 44% in Azerbaijan, 32% in Georgia).

Another primary source of income for many families is a pension or other government benefit (23% in Armenia, 28% in Azerbaijan, and 30% in Georgia.)

Agricultural sales is another primary source (12% in Armenia, 12% in Azerbaijan, and 15% in Georgia).

But perhaps more interesting looking at total sources of money. Nearly 20% of Armenian families use money from relatives abroad to live on (11% of families use it as the PRIMARY source of income).

In all three countries, relatives help our other relatives that live in the same place (maybe a capital city relative helps village relatives?) (11% in Armenia, 8% in Azerbaijan, and 12% in Georgia).

But what is really interesting is that half of all families depend on some form of government assistance for money, although only a quarter or so say that it is their primary income.

In all three countries, salary and pension are the primary ways that people get money.

Incomesources

View more presentations from Katy Pearce.

11 Aug

Not surprisingly, Yerevan, Baku, and Tbilisi residents wealthier

Regional differences are a big deal in the Caucasus. Thus, I did a comparison between capital city residents, those that live in regional cities, and rural villagers with the 2010 Caucasus Barometer.

In Armenia in 2010, people living in the capital have the most consumption ability (mean = 2.33), followed by regional cities (mean = 2.04), and the least able to consume are rural people (mean = 1.89).

In Azerbaijan in 2010, people living in the capital are the most able to consume (mean = 2.52), while people in regional cities (mean = 2.11) and rural (mean = 2.12) areas are no different in their consumption ability.

In Georgia in 2010, people living in the capital have the most consumption ability (mean = 2.29), followed by regional cities (mean = 2.11), and the least able to consume are rural people (mean = 1.97).

Comparing all three countries, the group that is able to consume the most is

1. AZ capital
2. AM capital
3. GE capital
4 (tie). AZ rural/ AZ urban / GE urban
5. AM urban
6 (tie). AM rural / GE rural

Thus, a rural Azerbaijani has more ability to buy things than a regional city Armenian or any Armenian or Georgian rural person.

Regionalconsumption

View more presentations from Katy Pearce.