Social Contacts and Inequality

I spent a good deal of time attempting to come up with a clever intro to this blog post, but I failed.

So lets just move on to the facts:

Ø In the summer of 2008, across 12 villages in Western Orissa, nearly 700 individuals were surveyed on their social contacts (meaning that they were asked to list all people that they speak to about health, money, and issues important to them).

Ø The individuals were randomly sampled, though the sample is weighted towards interviewing those who have a BISWA self help group (SHG) member in their household. BISWA is an NGO-MFI located in the region.

Ø The study found that, for those who report any contact, men have on average 0.4 more social contacts than women, and men and women from households with a BISWA SHG member report more contacts than their fellow villagers that do not have a BISWA SHG member in their household.

Ø Men not only enumerated more contacts, but on average men's contacts also live further from them than women's contacts.

Ø The contacts of respondents from households with a BISWA member live in households that are on average a greater distance from their household (though this does not seem to be statistically significant from the preliminary data).

Ø This data could be skewed for a number of reasons, perhaps none of which is more important than the fact that all surveyors were male. Though of course this should have little to no affect on the numbers comparing respondents who come from households with or without a BISWA SHG member.

Now on to my assumptions:

Ø Having more social contacts is good! Knowing and speaking to more people leads to the observation of more diverse opinions and behaviors, and, I think eventually, better outcomes for your own behavior. Of course this not always true (see smoking and gangs), but on the aggregate I believe it is generally positive. Positive knowledge transfers of this sort are discussed in this paper by Tim Conley and Chris Udry, and this article by Nicholas Christakis on the impact of having those in your social network receive medical treatment.

Ø Speaking to people over a larger geographical distance is good! Having access to people who live larger distances from you leads to the observation of more diverse opinions and behaviors, and again, better outcomes.

Ø The facts presented above do not suggest causality. We cannot and should not assume that people who have BISWA SHG members in their household have more contacts because they have a member of their household in a BISWA SHG. It could be easily be the other way around. That those who have more social contacts end up joining SHGs. I easily could be mistaken, but my intuitive belief is that the two compound each other. Having more social contacts makes one more likely to join an SHG and thus gain even more social contacts.

What this all might mean for development policy:

Ø Perhaps NGOs should actively seek to identify those women who are not in SHGs and convince them to join an SHG and encourage the members of an SHG to accept them. But this is fraught with all sorts of problems. Their may be an intrinsic reason why these women are not in SHGs. They may not be cut out for joining a group in which they are expected to take on financial and social responsibility. Perhaps if these women joined an SHG their husbands would be enraged by their newfound mobility and this would be a cause for domestic abuse.

Ø When delivering education campaigns and other public goods, the government and NGOs should actively go door step to door step. We know from previous studies that we have conducted that, in the region in which BISWA operates, those women who are not in SHGs come from poorer households. These are the women and men most in need of knowledge transfers and health products. It may be that to help the poorest and those most lacking opportunity, we must serve them directly. But this strategy could also be flawed because, though I would hope this is not true, it is reasonable to think that these are the women least able to utilize information because of a lack of power within the household, education or motivation.

This leads to a recurring conclusion on this blog. More research is needed! In this case, specifically to understand how interventions impact, not just the entire population, but those who are most disadvantaged. We often focus on equality within nations, but perhaps more focus needs to be directed towards equality within villages.

*Thanks to Patricia Foo for help with this post