Social psychology and development aid by Hansen - Article

More than a billion people in the world live in poverty. These people have a few material possessions and suffer from hunger. Governments spend large sums of money on development aid projects to improve the living conditions of people in low income countries. The aid that is provided, aims to improve environmental, social, economic and political development in low income countries. An example of economic aid is to give microcredit, so that people can develop their own income generating activity. Developmental aid focuses on improving people’s living conditions in the long run. Humanitarian aid, by contrast, has a short-term focus. Humanitarian aid focuses on relieving the immediate suffering of people struck by a natural disaster, like a disease or tsunami or man-made disasters like a conflict. Humanitarian aid aims to do this by providing material and logistic assistance (food, rescue teams and medical services).

People debate whether investments in development aid can improve the life of people in poor countries. One side says that initial large investments are crucial to reduce poverty. They argue that’s because they can help countries overcome the poor position. The other side argues that aid worsens the situation because it can corrupt local institutions and undermine them. Also, it can create powerful aid agencies. Therefore, it’s important to know if development aid interventions can be effective. Therefore, we need to know how to study the effectiveness of development aid interventions and which factors can increase its effectiveness. Social psychological theories can help to answer these questions. Psychologists can help us gain a better understanding in when and how development aid projects are successful or unsuccessful in reaching their goals.

The evaluation of development aid interventions

The focus of many development aid interventions is on changing people’s behaviour. The tools and technologies that are given to people from poor countries require that those people change their daily practices. Social psychological theory can be applied to design and improve interventions. Also, social psychological research methods can be used to examine whether an aid programme had the intended effect and which factors contributed to its success or the lack thereof. Impact evaluations can be used for this. They try to determine to what extent different activities of an aid project contribute to the achievement of the intended goals by assessing impacts (long and short terms). Sound impact evaluations have become more important nowadays. Governments and donors often request an impact evaluation to see how their money was spent and whether it resulted in the anticipated effects. These impact evaluations can offer important insights and help decide which projects should be continued and how aid projects should be changed to increase their effectiveness. These impact evaluations can convince new donors to support a project.

Project designers use a result chain of an intervention to monitor and evaluate the success of an intervention. This result chain helps the organizers to define different aspects of an intervention. It shows a graphical illustration with the different components of the intervention and the relation with each other. It’s important to define these different components, in order to understand how specific activities should result in the intended impacts.

Organizations also develop a theory of change. This is a methodological tool and it’s often part of programme planning and evaluation. In this, the vision of the longer-term goals of an intervention are described, as well as how the project leaders will want to reach their goals and what measures they will use to assess progress.

The theory of change explains how and why certain activities will bring about the changes the project participants seek to achieve. A theory of change first shows a causal pathway from inputs and activities to impacts. This is done by specifying what is needed for goals to be achieved. It then requires the programme leaders to articulate underlying assumptions, which can be measured and tested. This helps with the understanding on whether and why interventions are effective. It should also change the way of thinking about interventions from what they are doing to what they want to achieve. Organizations often do their own impact evaluations or they hire external consultancies to evaluate an intervention. It’s crucial for an evaluation to define the specific components of an intervention and develop good measures to assess outputs and impacts.

Testing the effectiveness of development aid interventions

The next example will illustrate how the effectiveness of an intervention can be studied by applying an experimental design. The example also shows that it’s important to consider the cultural context when designing and evaluating interventions.

Improved cooking stoves intervention

In low income countries, traditional cooking stoves are widely used. Unfortunately, the open fires in small huts and houses cause health problems, such as lung disorders. One development aid programme aimed to introduce an improved cooking stove that would improve health, decrease indoor pollution and reduce fuel consumption. It was also designed so that it looked like the traditional stoves and it was constructed with local materials for a low price. An enclosed cooking chamber was included, to keep the flame separate from the food and there was also a chimney to direct smoke away out of the house. The traditional stoves could only include one pot, while this new stove could include two. This could reduce cooking time. Tests showed that there was reduced indoor air pollution with the stove and that the new stove also required less fuel.

The new cooking stove was distributed for free in one of the poorest states in India. A public lottery was used to randomly assign households in each village to one of three conditions using a waiting control list method. One third of the households within each village received the improved stoves at the start of the project, the second third received the stoves about two years after the first deployment and the final third received it another two years later. People from the village received information about the stove during village meetings. 2651 households in 44 villages were followed for four years after the first stove deployment. The assessment of outputs was done by looking at the number of distributed stoves and the given trainings.

Impacts were assessed by researchers visiting the houses and looking at three things. The first thing researchers looked at was whether the stoves were in use and whether old stoves were used as well. The second thing they looked at were health indicators. They asked the villagers about their health symptoms, like coughs and cold (this was done via self-reports) and they also conducted physical health checks to diagnose lung disorders. The third thing they looked at were fuel expenditures. The researchers found that only 70% of households that ‘won’ the money for the stove, built the stove during the first six months of the programme. Also, they found that the usage of the stoves greatly decreased over time. This was mainly due to improper maintenance. The researchers found a reduction on smoke inhalation for the primary cook in the first year. No further health improvements were found over longer time periods. Also, the fuel consumption did not decrease. How is it that a cooking stove that showed very promising results in the laboratory settings would not be used in the field?

The improved stoves were not valued enough by the households, according to the researchers who studied the introduction of the improved stoves. Benefits may not have been obvious enough. There was little information that may explain why people may not use the new stoves. There was obviously low satisfaction with the stoves, but no further information was obtained that could offer a deeper insight in the reasons why the stoves were not used.

Experimental designs

In the field of development aid interventions, an experimental design that compares different groups that received different types of interventions to achieve a certain goal is commonly used. The main aim of this type of design is to understand which type of intervention would be most efficient to achieve the intended primary goal or impact. There have been different large scale studies that used a psychological approach to increase people’s motivation to perform a specific behaviour. They used incentives. These incentives can have positive or negative outcomes. One study showed that small, non-financial incentives (1 kilogram of lentils per immunization) given to the mothers helped to increase the immunization rate of children to improve health outcomes. However, providing an additional incentive may only increase people’s external motivation to change the behaviour (getting immunization for their children), but not their internal motivation. People might be less likely to get immunization against another disease in the future when no additional incentives are provided.

These two examples show that it’s important to clearly define the components of an intervention and to apply a robust study design (randomization, control groups, longitudinal design) in order to draw causal conclusions about the effectiveness of an intervention. Also, many Western projects of development aid don’t consider the local culture carefully. This may have crucial implications for the longer-term impacts of aid programmes. The interventions or instruments used are often developed in more modernized and individualistic countries. They are often carefully pre-tested in these cultures and assumptions about their functioning are based on psychological and cultural factors relevant in the corresponding culture. These innovations then get introduced in very different cultures, which have low incomes and are collectivistic. Qualitative research may help to understand the cultural context. It’s important to learn more about people’s daily routines and the psychological process. Also, one needs to keep in mind that every small innovation would also require a change in people’s habits and behaviour. When thinking about the example of the innovated cooking stove, one might argue that women get to spend less time on searching for wood every day and that this is a positive thing. However, it could be the case that women enjoy going to the woods to look for wood, because they like to be alone or to talk to other women who are also going to the woods to look for wood.

Development aid and social psychology

Social psychological research can help improve interventions and impact evaluations. Information about the cultural context can help give insight on how to successfully introduce an intervention and to stimulate longer-term impacts. A pre-test could be done with a smaller sample to see whether and who would use the stove. Qualitative research methods, like interviews and focus group discussions can give insight about the reasons why people may or may not use the stove. Also, people from low income countries are often not used to answer questions on a scale and they often can’t read and write. It’s therefore important to use qualitative methods. Additional measures that assess psychological factors (attitudes, habits and social norms) can offer important insight on why people may reject a new stove. It’s good to apply different methods. Below, an example will be given about social psychological research in the field of a health-related intervention in developing countries. The example considers the cultural context.

Example

Each year, more than a million children die before their fifth birthday because of diarrhoea. Most of those children live in low income countries. Most of these deaths could be prevented if safe water supply, hygiene and sanitation would be available. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends a simple method of solar water disinfection (SODIS). With this, people can clean their contaminated drinking water. The contaminated water is filled in the cleaned PET bottle and placed in full sunlight for at least six hours. The water will be disinfected and can be drunk. This method kills a large number of pathogens that contaminated the water. Although this method improves health (by disinfecting water), is easy to use, inexpensive and has been promoted since 1995, only moderate success has been achieved. Only some people use this method and many even stop using it after some time. Governments and non-governmental organizations have employed different strategies to promote adoption of it. An example is training people about the appropriate use of the method. There are three types of promotional strategies: mass media (radio and TV), centralized communication (health fair) or interpersonal communication (experts). But, it’s important to consider the cultural context. For instance, people who live in low income nations belong to more collectivist cultures. Their behaviour will be strongly influenced by their communities and their motivation to adhere to social norms.

Unanticipated cultural change through laptop usage

Interventions may stimulate unanticipated side-effects that aren’t beforehand considered by the organizers. The side-effects may also lead to cultural change. In the following section, the role of culture and how it may change due to a development aid intervention will be shown with yet another example. But first, the term culture and some other terms needs to be defined. Culture is a collective phenomenon that provides a common frame of reference for people to make sense of their reality. In a culture, specific symbolic concepts like the environment, social systems, policies, the self, norms and values give form and direction to behaviour. Culture doesn’t only reside inside individuals, but it’s also located in society, products and institutions. The sociocultural system in which people live shape the individual. Cultures can influence and inform the self-concept of people and they can be differentiated in individualism versus collectivism of societies and the independence versus interdependence of self-construals. People who endorse an independent self-construal view the self as an independent entity. They strive for their own goals. People who endorse an interdependent self-construal view the self in relation to others and their self-other relationship will mainly guide their behaviour. Research has shown that many low income countries are collectivist and wealthy countries are often individualistic. This can have implications for introducing a certain innovation that has been created in an individualistic country to a collectivistic country.

An example of modernization is introducing a laptop in a least developed country in which only a few people have access to a computer. Research has shown that the introduction of technology can be a powerful driving force of cultural and social change. Introducing new technologies can shape a culture. Traditional societies can transform to more modern societies. Modernization theory assumes that different aspects of modernization (new technologies) can stimulate cultural and social change. One of the indicators researchers have looked at are values. Shifts in values are viewed as a sign of social and cultural change. Values are guiding principles in people’s life and they influence people’s behaviour. Studies have shown that certain values become more important over time due to modernization (e.g. tolerance, trust and participation). Other values do not change over time (religion and tradition).

Example

The modernization theory was tested in the context of a laptop programme for students in Ethiopia. This was done in order to study the processes underlying cultural change on a micro-level. The researchers wanted to know whether the introduction of a laptop for students lead to stronger endorsement of more modern values and whether the level of endorsement of specific traditional values would persist.

This study was conducted in Ethiopia, which is one of the poorest countries in the world and most children there haven’t seen a laptop. To them, a laptop is a piece of modernization. Students from the fifth and sixth grade were given a personal laptop that they could use in school and take home. These students were followed for two years and they were compared with a matched comparison group of students without a laptop. Students could use their laptop to read their schoolbooks, edit text, make calculations, browse an offline database of Wikipedia and a picture gallery, play memory games, make pictures, videos and paintings, compose music and chat with other laptops within 10 meters. There was no internet access available to the students when the research was conducted.

The researchers found that there was consistent and strong evidence of value change. Children who were using their laptop for six months more strongly endorsed agentic cultural values. These were achievements, universalism (treat everyone equally), self-direction and benevolence. It seems that values related to individual enhancement as well as care of others were strengthened. The researchers suggested that the students developed a stronger sense of agency. This means that students realised that they are more strongly capable to intentionally influence their own choices, actions and the course of events. The researchers assume that the sense of agency was strengthened by learning how to master the laptop independent of the teachers or parents, trying out new activities and maybe by explaining it to others. Also, the students developed stronger attitudes for gender equality (boys and girls should have the same chances in life). Both boys and girls used the laptop equally frequent and they developed an equally strong sense of agency. In rural areas (compared to urban areas) the changes were stronger. That’s because the majority of students in rural areas had never seen a laptop before compared to the city were some students had seen computers. On the countryside, the laptops were more modern and had a stronger impact on cultural change. As expected, expressions of more traditional values (listening to parents and following what religion requires) persisted and even increased slightly.

In a following step, the researchers wanted to see whether the findings could be replicated with other measures of cultural expressions and they wanted to investigate whether usage or mere ownership of a laptop would drive the effects. The researchers also had an interesting additional comparison group: one year after laptop deployment, some laptops broke and could not be used, but students still carried their laptops to school. The students owned, but could not use the laptop and profit from the activities given by the laptop. So, these students had mere ownership. The researchers predicted that the students who were actively using a laptop would more strongly endorse individualist values and more strongly described themselves in terms of an independent self-construal compared to the comparison group. The researchers didn’t expect any differences in more traditional cultural expressions. They compared children who frequently used their laptop with a comparison group of children without laptops and a group of children whose laptop had broken down.

The researchers found that only students who were actively using their laptop showed higher endorsement of an independent self-construal and individualist values, compared to students who didn’t own a laptop. Students whose laptop broke did not significantly differ from the laptop and no laptop comparison group. Also, more traditional cultural expressions did not differ between the conditions. Both studies show that values that represent change became more important after using the laptop for some time, while more traditional values persisted. This only occurred when students actively used their laptops, mere ownership of the laptops did not lead to the effects.

Applied social psychology in context

Interdisciplinary knowledge is needed to investigate and improve the effectiveness of the projects. Social psychologists can offer a complementary perspective for designing and evaluating development aid interventions. They can help you discover when and why some interventions are successful and others are not by taking into account social psychological factors and cultural differences. Conducting research in low income countries can have an ethical challenge to it. One of the ethical challenges is the sample selection. Some people will be able to profit from the intervention, while the control group probably won’t. Organizations often have limited funds and can’t support everyone. Random selection can help to somehow fairly distribute the scarce resources. The people from the control group might receive the same benefits at a later time (when the study is over).

Research conducted in low income countries can help researchers find out whether theories are generalizable. Most of the research is conducted with participants from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies (WEIRD). The majority of these participants is a young college student from the United States, who participate in studies for course credits. Research that is conducted in other parts of the world and among the general population could offer scientists more insight about the generalizability of the results. It can also shed light on relevant cultural factors which explain differences between cultures.