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.

trust

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.

money

ill

reapir

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%.

facebookusers

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.

friends2

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.

fbactivities

 

15 Mar

Voting in 2013 – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia

The new Caucasus Barometer is out and I did some analysis on voting behaviors. (Here’s 2011 and Here’s 2012.)

vote

These voting rates seem to match up with the official reported rates.

fairness

Wow – this is all over the place. Georgia isn’t a surprise, Armenia is interesting, and Azerbaijan is depressing.

pARTICIPATE

Interesting with regard to the reported turn outs.

04 Mar

Azerbaijan and gender online 2013 sneak peek

Okay okay okay… a sneak preview.

Previous posts on Azerbaijan and gender online for context…

* Gender online, Azerbaijan, 2012, Caucasus Barometer
* Regional and gender Internet activities, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, 2012, Caucasus Barometer
* Internet infographic, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, 2012, Caucasus Barometer
* Social networking sites, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, 2012, Caucasus Barometer
* All technology, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia (with gender and regional), 2011, Caucasus Barometer
* All technology, Azerbaijan (with gender), 2011, Caucasus Barometer

And here’s one sneak peek at what’s going on in Azerbaijan with women getting online in 2013.

sex

04 Mar

2013 Internet Penetration – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia

My favorite day of the year is here! No, not Fat Tuesday – but new Caucasus Barometer data day!

I’ll be posting a variety of analyses over the coming weeks, but here’s the one everyone loves – percent of adult Internet users in each country.

First, let us all acknowledge that I hate talking about Internet penetration because I think that it is meaningless to talk about percentage of users without contextualizing the economic, social, political, and cultural environment in which Internet use exists.

And here are dozens of other posts about technology use in the Caucasus.

This is data from the Caucasus Barometer, which is a trustworthy source. Read more about it at the link or check out their page and play around with the data. These results are all for adults.

First, this year’s distribution:

freq3

You can see that a large percentage of Caucasians aren’t using the Internet. Again, I’d rather be talking about who those people are (poorer, older, rural, less educated, women) than just percentages, but alas, this is what you all want, isn’t it? 😉 You can also see that most Internet users are online daily, although in Azerbaijan, they’re fairly divided between daily and once a week.

Now, on to the trends over time:

Next, those who ever use:

ever

Ever used – this is a bit meaningless, as the benefits of Internet use are certainly relative to how often one is using it. Getting online less than one a month is an entirely different experience than being online daily (or all day long as is often the case.) But again, people are really interested in this. Each country saw some growth, but certainly the growth will  slow down as time passes.

Daily use trends:

daily

In my eyes, daily use is the most meaningful measure here. Those who are online daily are getting the most out of their Internet use. Once again, you can see that there is a huge gap between Armenia and Georgia with Azerbaijan. I’ve discussed this at length, but one reason for this is the lower percentage of Azerbaijani women online. But there are other reasons too. In the coming weeks I’ll elaborate on this.

For those that wonder if these Azerbaijan numbers are legitimate, I point you to this blog post.

Coming soon with be posts on:

gender differences
social networking site use
ownership of technology

I’m happy to answer questions!

02 Mar

SXSWi 2014 – LOLs of Nations

DonkeyBlogger Somehow I will be unlocking a major nerd achievement and will be speaking at SXSWi on March 8.

My panel is called The LOLs of Nations: Understanding Global Memes. (We will also have a discussion of the panel at the Beacon Lounge immediately after the panel.)

all the animals

My talk is loosely based on these two papers that came out in January.

The TL;DR is that although memes have a lot of affordances that can make them powerful tools for political or social change, we should be cautious to assume that this will always be used for good. I’ll talk about how in Azerbaijan, memes created by those with very close ties to the government have been used to attack dissidents.

And what’s tough about this is that there is really no way for these dissidents to fight back without severe consequences. Retaliating is likely to result in worse punishment.

I’ll post my slides in the coming days once they’re finalized, but for now, here is a draft. There will also be an audio recording of this talk.

01 Mar

March 2014 – Facebook ad suggestions at Facebook use in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia

This is an update to this post from January.

It is hard to know how many people in a country are using Facebook, but through Facebook’s Ad selling program, you can get some rounded information. The numbers they give are not exact, so these percentages displayed below are not accurate for the true number of users. THESE RESULTS MAY NOT ADD UP TO REASONABLE 100%S. I calculated everything from the actual population. So when it says 36% of Georgian women are X, I calculated from the population data from the World Bank. This isn’t SOLID information, but it does come FROM Facebook, so it is a little bit better than SocialBakers.

This is what it looks like to find out this information:

facebook

So, Armenia has 2,974,184 people, Azerbaijan 9,590,159 people, and Georgia 4,555,911 people total according to the World Bank and after I subtracted those age 0-14 (World Bank’s category, not mine) the populations are Armenia: 2,460,436; Azerbaijan: 7,419,487; Georgia: 3,855,233.

Facebook Ads says that this many people in each of those countries is a potential viewer of their ads (thus a Facebook user): Armenia: 580,000 (in January) 620,000 (in March); Azerbaijan: 1,320,000 (in January) 1,380,000 (in March); Georgia: 1,220,000 (in January) 1,280,000 (in March).

Thus, here are the percentages of the age 14+ populations of each country who are on Facebook:

a(January)a2

Armenia: 25%
Azerbaijan: 19%
Georgia: 34%

So that is interesting, but let us look at gender differences (I took the direct gender population data from the age distribution tables – this is not 50/50, but more accurate).

b(January)b2

Armenians and Georgians are evenly distributed gender-wise on Facebook. And Azerbaijanis, well, this gender difference isn’t surprising.

c(January)c2

In terms of the balance of users, Armenians are fairly even, Georgians have a bit more women and you can see that about 2/3rds of Azerbaijanis on Facebook are men. Although this may seem shocking, this is much better than it has been in previous years.

A category that the World Bank uses is ages 15-24 and we know that 18% of Armenians and Azerbaijanis and 14% of Georgians are in that age range – I again used the raw numbers from the World Bank to calculate these.

Armenia Azerbaijan Georgia
ages 15-24 280000 780000 540000
male 15-24
500000 260000
% to pop 0.54032849 0.574409822 0.856504848
female 15-24 134000 280000 280000
% to pop 0.548320768 0.329550564 0.9054309690.905430969

d(January) EDIT: THIS SHOULD BE 15-24 YEAR OLDS!

d2

Wow Georgia! Most Georgian young adults are on Facebook, no doubt about that. About half of Armenian young adults and for Azerbaijan 57% of male young adults and a third of female young adults.

I also looked at the 13-18 year old users on Facebook, but I can’t compare them to the total population of 13-18 year old males and females in these states because I don’t have the data from the WorldBank. But here are the raw numbers and the ratio of male to female.

Armenia Azerbaijan Georgia
ages 13-18 130000 300000 240000
male 13-18 66000 190000 116000
female 13-18 64000 110000 128000
male/female 1.03125 1.727272727 0.90625

And here are the raw numbers for 18+, which I can’t analyze by age category because I don’t have the WorldBank data to compare, and the ratio of male to female.

Armenia Azerbaijan Georgia
ages 18+ 520000 1180000 110000
male 18+ 260000 760000 500000
female 18+ 260000 420000 600000
male/female 1 1.80952381 0.833333333

Those ratios in Azerbaijan are notable.

For comparison, here’s Caucasus Barometer derived information from 2012.

26 Feb

The Internet is Good For You!

The Internet is a strange thing. In the early life of the Internet there was a lot of rhetoric about how bad the Internet would be for all sorts of things – relationships, social life, civic engagement, etc. Now we know that 1) the Internet is here to stay and 2) the effects of the Internet aren’t really good or bad, but that affordances of the Internet (or any technology) can impact particular social processes/mechanisms in ways that change outcomes.

This week there is a tremendous effort in Azerbaijan to raise money for a young woman with cancer. The Internet and social media allow for word to spread about the campaign, give information on how to donate, and promote the campaign through photos. Moreover, the social aspect of social media allows people to share the campaign with their friends, show that they are themselves participating (and thus showing everyone – hey! I’m a good person!), and additionally give a little FU to the government medical system that is unable to pay for this young woman’s treatment.

Because of this, as well as my graduate course I’m teaching about pro-social outcomes of technology use, I wanted to test to see the Internet and social media’s influence on particular pro-social outcomes (of civic engagement specifically) in Azerbaijan.

I did some analysis with the 2012 Caucasus Barometer and here is what I found.

Donating to charity (even via SMS) is popular in Azerbaijan with 18% of adults having done it in the last 6 months. Education, economic status, and being male mattered a lot here, but Internet frequency did too! Surprisingly perhaps, being a member of a social networking site had no effect.

Volunteering (without compensation) is complicated in post-Soviet environments, yet it is also fairly popular in Azerbaijan with 22% of adults having volunteered in the psat 6 months. We know that those that do volunteer are younger and better educated. So I tested (binominal regression) the impact of Internet frequency on volunteering, controlling for urbanness, sex, age, economic status, and education. The most important determinant of volunteering was being male (men 1.5 times as likely to volunteer as women), then economic status and education (both were 1.25x as likely to participate if you were higher in these things), but regardless, Internet frequency mattered too, with frequent Internet users being 1.09x as likely to volunteer.

One form of civic engagement (which some may argue is actually a form of protest or dissent) is sending a letter to a newspaper or TV or radio station. We already know that the people that tend to do this are more politically and civically engaged, so I controlled for urbanness, sex, age, economic status, and education. And I found that more frequent Internet users were 1.27 times as likely to sending a letter or call a media station. Social networking site users were 1.2X as likely to do this as well. Importantly though, less than 5% of Azerbaijani adults actually did this!

Cultural capital is often measured by participating in cultural activities. The Internet matters here too. Frequent Internet users were 1.25X as likely to go to the theatre or cinema than less frequent Internet users. But really what mattered here was living in Baku. Bakvuians are 6x as likely to go to these things, unsurprisingly, although regional city dwellers went too. Economic status and education mattered here too. But only 11% have done this in the last 6 months.

So looks like the Internet is a “good” thing in terms of these outcomes in Azerbaijan.