For more than a decade, 主播大秀 Media Action has worked to support young people in Cambodia – on issues including sexual and reproductive health, and job-hunting skills in a difficult labour market. We’ve done this through our brands Loy9, Love9 and more recently Klahan9 (Brave 9) – engaging young people where they are, through reality TV, social media and in road shows.

In 2020 we wanted to focus on how to engage more young people in civic life. We knew that people were hesitant to participate in public life, didn’t discuss politics and civic issues with others, and were fearful of doing so. When we had conducted research on this topic before, people were very reluctant to talk to our researchers, too.

We wanted to develop a deeper understanding of different groups of young people, exploring what they know about how they can participate, whether they discuss civic issues, what attitudes and norms affect their participation, and who influences their actions. We also wanted to understand the online behaviour of young people, as social media is an important platform for our project.

We realised we had much to learn! We used this opportunity to try out some new research methods alongside more traditional methodologies that could help us develop insights on these issues, to understand how to support 15-30-year-old Cambodians to engage in civic life, all through media and our programming.

Thirty years after declaring independence from the Soviet Union, Georgia is becoming increasingly cosmopolitan, with a highly connected young population and a robust media scene. But where do Georgia’s people turn to find reliable information – and how can truly independent media find financial support to continue? Our researchers set out to learn how.

In a media market where so many outlets have biases to match their financial backers, where do you go to find trusted information?

After 30 years of independence, Georgia has a relatively free media scene – scoring 60 out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index in 2021, ahead of Poland and Japan. It enshrines freedom of speech in its constitution and has a large number of media outlets serving a population of four million people, held in part to account by a Broadcasters’ Code of Conduct.

But misinformation and political influence over media content abounds, and it’s hard for audiences to know what to trust. As part of our Eastern Partnership project to support independent media and improve editorial standards, we set out to learn how the Georgian people consume media, and how they feel about what they can access. In turn, our research would help inform the strategy and media programmes of our partners - Studio Monitori, Mtis Ambebi, Netgazeti and Batumlebi. 

We took a wide measure, with representatives from five regions of the country, through 30 online focus group sessions and 48 in-depth interviews. Our respondents were equally divided between men and women, ranged in age from 18 to over 55, and included people with disability, people identifying as LGBTQI, and ethnic minorities – including Armenian, Azeri and Russian language speakers.

People at a newspaper stand in Tbilisi, Georgia. Credit: Getty images

Communication is a critical part of humanitarian response. People need access to relevant, reliable information, so they can make informed decisions about how to keep their families safe. When communities are affected by crisis, we work with local media, government and humanitarian agencies to make sure the voices of communities are heard, and they have access to the information they need.

主播大秀 Media Action has a long history of training media and humanitarian practitioners on the importance of working together to communicate effectively with communities affected by crisis. We have always conducted audience research to inform our media programming. More recently, we have started actively sharing our research to help the humanitarian sector understand and respond to the people they are assisting.. Through our ongoing response to the Rohingya crisis in Bangladesh, we now have evidence of how our work can impact how humanitarians communicate with communities in a response.

Supporting media, NGO practitioners and others to communicate effectively

Across countries, we work with local media to make practical and relevant content and provide platforms for discussion. For example, our Ogaal (Be Informed) radio programme helped support communities affected by drought in Somalia; Milijuli Nepali (Together Nepal) radio programme provided practical information to people affected by the 2015 earthquake, and more recently information around COVID-19.

We often train humanitarian workers and local media in , sharing our approach on how and what to communicate to communities in crisis, and building relationships so they are ready to respond together when needed. For example, a recent partnership with International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) included training national staff and NGO workers alongside local media in eight countries.

Providing audience insight to humanitarian sector to improve response

Our knowledge about how to communicate and make engaging content is based on a strong understanding of our audiences. Effective communication cannot happen without listening to the needs and priorities of our audiences, and knowing how best to engage them. Over time we have realised that data about the audience needs, values and attitudes is not just valuable for us and our media partners, but for our humanitarian colleagues too.

The most recent example of this work is in the Rohingya refugee response in Bangladesh. Since the beginning of the crisis in 2017, we have been collating community feedback from humanitarian partners and carrying out regular research in the camps to understand people’s needs and priorities. We’ve been sharing our insights with humanitarian partners through the regular , and other , to ensure communities’ perspectives are being heard.

Getty images for 主播大秀 Media Action only

Seeing, the saying goes, is believing. But how true does this hold when it comes to disabilities that are not immediately apparent?

As humans, those of us who can see make sense of the world around us with our eyes – leading to, perhaps, an unthinking look of disapproval for a person without a visible disability who uses the disabled parking bay, or an individual who walks into the airport requesting wheelchair assistance. But it’s important to remember that when it comes to disability, there is often more than meets the eye.

Disability has been recognised as a public health issue by the World Health Organization, and over one billion people, or 15% of the global population, are estimated to be living with some form of disability, including invisible impairments such as anxiety, depression, chronic illnesses, and vision and hearing impairments.

However, there is a lack of data around the number of persons with these invisible disabilities, and how they are recognised and perceived in the societies in which they live. Without this data, we cannot fully understand the challenges and stigma they face, making it even harder to foster understanding and begin to overcome the barriers they face to employment, education and inclusion in society.

Researching disability in Nigeria

主播大秀 Media Action recently had an opportunity to conduct research around disability in Nigeria. We implemented an 18-month project to tackle stigma and discrimination around all kinds of disability – both visible and invisible - in Nigeria, under the Inclusive Futures programme funded by the UK Government’s Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office. Our radio drama, Story Story, used a fully inclusive team of Nigerian writers and actors to bring these issues to life and challenge prejudice and stigma – but to do so effectively, we needed to fully understand the local context.

The cast of Story Story record an episode in Abuja, Nigeria.

Audiences are at the heart of all of our work - and reaching them effectively and at scale has never been as critical as during the global pandemic.

To design any project or programme we need to understand where people are starting from: what do they know?  What difficulties are they facing?  What information is missing?  Who do they trust?  What attitudes do they hold?  

A crisis makes this information all the more important - and in the case of the pandemic, even more difficult to gather. Our work in humanitarian situations helps other aid agencies strengthen their understanding of audiences to support their own humanitarian response, as we have been doing in Cox’s Bazar and Afghanistan.

Last year, at the height of the pandemic, we were commissioned by World Health Organization to develop a , enabling them to collect timely insights into people’s changing needs, to help ensure that WHO country offices’ COVID-19 response and service delivery is reflecting these.

We designed a methodology and research tool to collect quantitative and qualitative data, and piloted it in Nigeria and Zambia to ensure that it was suitable to embed data in the overall COVID-19 response.  

Design amid challenges

We designed the tool to ensure that there was flexibility in the research method, given changing restrictions related to the pandemic. We created a quantitative survey questionnaire that could be conducted remotely by mobile phone or face-to-face, to understand social and behaviour change around COVID-19, as well as a method to conduct further exploratory qualitative research  to understand issues that came up in the quantitative survey more fully.

It wasn’t easy to conduct research remotely. In Nigeria, for instance, enumerators encountered challenges including poor phone connectivity, and hesitancy, unwillingness and mistrust from participants. In some cases, enumerators were accused of being scammers, given the prevalence of scam calls in the country; some respondents simply hung up. Some interviews also had to be conducted very late at night to accommodate respondents’ availability. And in Zambia, load-shedding led to power cuts, requiring us to make appointments  in advance to ensure the respondents’ phones could be charged in preparation.

In both countries, face-to-face interviews were also conducted to ensure that we collected data from the most vulnerable people, who were less comfortable being interviewed by mobile phone. 

A woman is interviewed for qualitative research in Nigeria. Credit: 主播大秀 Media Action Nigeria

Back in March 2020, everyone was worried about what would happen when the COVID-19 pandemic reached the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar. It is one of the most densely populated parts of the world, with challenging sanitation and limited health care resources; live in tarpaulin shelters on unstable slopes and up to 12 inhabitants share each shelter.

Experts warned that up to 98% of the population would be infected during the first year and, without effective intervention, the hospital’s 340 beds would be full to bursting within 2-5 months.

By late March, Bangladesh authorities had restricted movement in and out of the camps, and on 8 April the Bangladesh government imposed a lockdown banning all travel into and out of the district. But in May, COVID-19 was confirmed in two Rohingya refugees and 10 Bangladeshis living nearby.

Looking back, we now know the situation was not as catastrophic as anticipated; cases in the camps remained , even as they rose across the country.

Research demonstrates some success

Why this happened is difficult to explain. But our research has demonstrated one success: the level of awareness among the Rohingya population about COVID-19, driven by sustained work by several agencies including the Common Service for Community Engagement and Accountability, led by 主播大秀 Media Action, which has been supporting Rohingya people and host communities to cope with COVID-19.

We carried out a face-to-face survey in January 2021, among nearly 2,700 Rohingya refugees and more than 1,000 people in adjacent host communities, to provide robust data on access to information and accountability in the camps. We measured the reach of our Common Service communication materials in these communities, and explored the association between exposure to this content and specific outcomes.

We found that almost two-thirds of the Rohingya population felt quite well-informed or well-informed about COVID-19, and Rohingya women felt more informed than men - 65% compared to 55%. More than 70% of Rohingya people could accurately identify COVID-19 symptoms, and said they felt well- informed about how to protect themselves. And a majority of people surveyed knew how to keep themselves safe: washing their hands with soap, which they said they didn’t do before but had been doing since the pandemic; wearing masks in public; keeping distance from people and avoiding crowds.

A vital role in informing about COVID-19

Our communication initiatives played a vital role in informing people about COVID-19, particularly for women who, because of traditional community values, are often secluded from public life with limited access to media. We found that 40% of Rohingya people had high levels of knowledge about COVID-19 – 47% among women, and 33% among men. This may be because trusted NGO staff and volunteers had been particularly effective at reaching Rohingya women through listening groups, door-to-door visits and women-friendly spaces, many of them using communication tools and techniques we have provided.

This is particularly important because we found that, unlike their host communities, the Rohingya people in the camps have limited access to mass media, and receive most of their information through these face-to-face communications interventions: meetings with NGO staff and volunteers, loud-speaker announcements, and communication materials made available at listening groups, food distribution points, health facilities and information hubs. We found that people who attend these places, and are exposed to this content, have greater knowledge about COVID-19.

This is a testament to all agencies who have been working tirelessly to communicate with the community throughout the pandemic. The Common Service project played a vital role in creating and sharing communication materials, now available on our for anyone to use.

At the onset of the pandemic, we produced more than 60 communication tools () designed to improve communication, awareness and knowledge of COVID-19 for the Rohingya and host communities, and for health workers themselves.

Following requests from the World Health Organization and other health-focused agencies, we produced videos to train frontline health workers on infection prevention and control. Several agencies also used our audio recordings for community health volunteers. Later in 2020, we produced dozens more tools in response to agency and sector requests: community-facing materials on COVID-19 awareness, prevention, and mitigation, and tip sheets for new protocols for food distribution, the re-opening of registration, the principles of case management, child protection and immunisation.

Our survey data found that 75% of the Rohingya community said they had seen or heard at least five pieces of Common Service content. And, vitally, those who had accessed our content were 1.6 times as likely to have greater knowledge about COVID-19 than those who hadn’t.

"People did not want to believe Covid is a real thing, so they [Common Service] made some videos. Imams were shown using masks in the video and it used habits and quotations from the Quran – this makes people take it seriously. This worked well. That really resonated with the community,” said a field-level practitioner in the Rohingya response.

Our researchers found community members liked the content because it was made for them, in their language; it was easy to understand; they could relate to the characters and the camp setting; and it was in line with their values.

The next deadly wave

In Cox’s Bazar, the pandemic is far from over. Since April this year, Bangladesh has again been under tough COVID-19 restrictions, following another wave of infections and the spread of the ‘Delta’ variant in neighbouring countries. Cases are also rising in the camps at a higher rate than before.

Once again, we know we need to redouble our efforts to communicate with this isolated community, living in a confined space and left out of the information shared by mass media in the region. If our research has shown us one thing, it is that with a targeted communication strategy, trustworthy, relevant, and engaging content can help save lives - even from a deadly virus.

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Arif Al Mamun is 主播大秀 Media Action's Head of Research in Bangladesh. Read more insights and impact from our Common Service project on our website.

In the not-for-profit sector we’ve already learned a lot from marketing techniques developed in the commercial world.

The best known example is probably the use of  in response to the HIV epidemic. Another technique, audience segmentation (the process of dividing people into groups based on their similarities – or their differences), can help us target the groups we seek to support. Just like a savvy business-person seeking to maximise their return on investment by ; development organisations can tailor their projects to achieve the greatest positive impact.

主播大秀 Media Action is not in the business of making money. But we are most certainly in the business of reaching people with content that both benefits and resonates with them.

This relies on a keen understanding of our target audience – what interests them; who do they trust; what are their priorities in life; what are their preferred means of communication? It goes beyond simple demographics (like age, gender, and income), which, while useful, are really only the beginning of understanding people and what might interest them.

Avoid "buying blind"

Imagine you were tasked with buying a birthday present for someone’s mother and all you know is that she’s a 64 year old woman. What would you buy her, and how likely is it that it will really hit the mark?

Similarly, what if you were designing a project to engage people more in governance? Everyone’s experience of politics, and perception of how they should influence the way their community or country is governed, is different. While this may relate to a person’s age, where they live, or their socio-economic status, these demographic factors do not give us the depth of understanding we need.

We need to understand their perceptions: how much they feel they know about politics and current affairs and how confident they are to engage in politics, as well as whether they are politically active, are part of politically motivated groups, or if they even discuss politics with others. We segmented our audience to do just this.

What our segments tell us

We used data from seven nationally representative surveys across Asia and Africa to identify homogenous sub-groups (in other words, groups of people who share similar characteristics and behaviours), based on their engagement in politics. We then explored correlations between the resulting clusters and various socio-demographic and media consumption characteristics, and triangulated this with qualitative data, to deepen our understanding of each group and develop more ‘tangible’ profiles (or descriptions).

So what did this process reveal about political engagement in the seven countries we explored, and how will we use it? 

We identified and developed five discrete segments across a spectrum of political engagement which ranged from people who are completely ‘detached’ from politics, right through to those who are avidly and actively engaged in political life.

A snapshot of how we segmented our audience

Working in the development sector I am aware that, particularly over the last few years, donors and others expect project results to be quantifiable. Numbers talk.

This was apparent at the in Cape Town in January when we looked at how the SDGs will be measured, and it was discussed again at the in Amsterdam this week. Donors want statistics to demonstrate impact and show a project is value for money, but aren’t as confident using insights from qualitative research.

In my team we crunch a lot of numbers. In 2016, for example, we surveyed more than 20,000 people, which yielded strong results. For example, a statistical analysis of governance data across seven countries (which controlled for confounders such as people’s age, education levels and existing interests) shows that people who listened to or watched our programmes know more about politics and get more involved in civic life. In our health work, we used quantitative data to understand .

But we have increasingly come to appreciate the need for qualitative research to contextualise our data and explain why we are having an impact. We’re not alone.

At the Esomar conference I took part in a panel with colleagues from My Choices Foundation, StreetInvest, and Save the Children to showcase how qualitative research can provide greater value to the development sector. I summarised what we had learned from our recent projects.

Story behind the numbers

Qualitative research helps us to explain the story behind quantitative data.

Our radio health shows in Ethiopia, Jember (Maternal Light) and Biiftuu Jireenya (Dawn of Life) aim to help women have safer pregnancies and deliveries, and improve the health of newborn babies. Our surveys showed they were reaching a huge audience – around 21 million people across three states - more than a third of the adult population.

However, analysis of our data showed it was difficult to isolate the impact of our programmes. The health sector in Ethiopia was changing fast the government and donor investment leading to local health workers being trained across the country. This investment was reaping benefits; data from the showed the percentage of women going for antenatal care had jumped from 27 % to 62 % between 2011 and 2016. But what impact were we having?

To understand, we designed qualitative research, whereby we spoke to women and those they felt influenced their decisions (such as their local health extension worker, their husbands and close family members).

Women told us how health services and social norms had changed since they had given birth to their older children. Things that had been unthinkable, such as giving birth at a health facility, were now possible. They were also able to identify storylines and items in the shows that made them think differently about what was “normal” during pregnancy and birth. The shows were reinforcing the advice that health workers were giving – and health workers also felt women trusted them more because they were saying the same information that they had heard on the radio.

Reaching vulnerable people

A limitation of quantitative research is that it’s hard to reach vulnerable groups such as refugees or survivors of gender-based violence. They are less likely to agree to a face-to-face survey or might not have a fixed address. In this situation, it helps to use qualitative research techniques that put respondents at ease.

Last year, we spoke to Syrian refugees travelling from Greece to Germany to understand how humanitarian agencies could best communicate with them. We employed Arabic-speaking researchers and trained them to use a narrative approach, where they sat with a refugee for at least an hour, hearing about their journey and the part communication had played in it. Being listened to, rather than asked a series of fixed questions, helped the respondents feel comfortable and more likely to share information.

Qualitative research can also help us understand sensitive issues. In Syria, we assessed our radio drama Hay el Matar. To understand issues around the conflict we asked a trusted, local NGO to use projective techniques. This involved asking respondents to discuss the feelings of others – either people in their community or an “extremist” character in the drama. People felt more comfortable talking about how others view violence, or explaining the motives of a fictional character, than talking about themselves.

We discovered that Syrians interpreted people’s accents as a strong signal for which side of the conflict they were on. We relayed this to our radio producers who took greater care with the accents of the actors. We could not have grasped these nuances with quantitative data alone.

Insights on a budget

There’s another cold, hard fact to take into account. Conducting quantitative research, on the scale needed to measure media interventions, is expensive. Project budgets often don’t stretch to this so we need to gain qualitative insights in the absence of large-scale, representative surveys.

At the end of the panel discussion in Amsterdam this week, the Esomar Foundation’s Phyllis MacFarlane asked a crucial question: “What does the development sector need to do for qualitative research to be taken more seriously? Steve Kretschmer from Surgo Foundation summed it up nicely.Quantitative data needs to be used to explain the “what” he said, but when it comes to the “why”, well-designed qualitative research is invaluable. He added that the development sector could work with the commercial sector to adopt practices such as using video to capture emotions (rather than relying on what people say) to make the most of audience insight and – most importantly – to make a difference.

More on that another time …

Sonia Whitehead is Head of Research at 主播大秀 Media Action.

Our world is home to . The majority of these 10 to 24-year-olds live in Asia, with 48 million alone growing up in Bangladesh.  

And many of these young people are having sex. Bangladesh has one of the highest adolescent fertility rates in all of South Asia, coming in at . This is compared to a figure of 71 for Afghanistan and Nepal, which share the next highest adolescent birth rate in the region. In the US, this number stands at 21, in the UK, 14.

In Bangladesh, this high birth rate is driven by girls . Nearly three quarters of married Bangladeshi women become wives before turning 18 – compared to fewer than 3% of men. Media Action carried out research with adolescents, parents and teachers to better understand why. 

Outside of everyone’s comfort zone

We found that children and adults alike struggle to talk about sexual and reproductive health (SRH) in Bangladesh, .

Teenagers are embarrassed to seek out advice from their elders, due to social stigma and shyness. We also learned that parents don’t start these conversations either – aside from the heart-to-hearts mothers have with their daughters about periods.

SRH is a taboo topic, which parents feel is inappropriate to bring up with adolescents before they get married. Our research revealed that adults believe that telling teenagers about contraceptives promotes promiscuity.

As for teachers, they are often evasive and are known to sometimes skip the chapters on sexual and reproductive health in textbooks. Those we interviewed said they faced social barriers in discussing sex with students of the opposite gender to themselves. They also didn’t feel properly supported by their colleagues and management to have these kinds of conversations.

Educators are also discouraged by students’ reluctance to discuss sex with them in the classroom. Some NGOs run SRH programmes in schools but teenagers we spoke with said that these paint an incomplete picture of what they need to know.

Recognising these issues, by providing universal access to information and services. Girls are being taught . But this isn’t enough.

Getting the lowdown

Adolescents are unsurprisingly hungry to know more about the experiences they all have, but which are never spoken about.

This is where the radio show (Crossroads at 10 to 19) comes in. Combining drama, songs and interviews with both experts and ordinary teenagers, Dosh Unisher Mor aimed to give young people the comprehensive lowdown on SRH they crave. 

The show helped teenagers come to terms with the physical and psychological changes that go with puberty, by presenting these as natural and nothing to be ashamed of. Adolescent listeners said they learned new things from the show, particularly about the physical changes they were experiencing. For example, the programme corrected the mistaken belief, held by many of the boys we spoke to, that wet dreams are a disease.

The show also helps adolescents realise just how traumatic early marriage can be for girls. Listeners came to understand that getting pregnant at a young age puts mothers – and their babies – at risk of health complications and even death.

Some explicitly said that Dosh Unisher Mor led them to see early marriage as a damaging social convention they had the responsibility to protest against. One girl was even driven to stop a child marriage from happening – telling her parents about it, who in turn informed the police.

Filling the information gap through entertainment

Teenagers appreciated that Dosh Unisher Mor was not only educational, but also entertaining. They saw it as a show with the power to change attitudes and influence people by facilitating open and natural discussions, informed by detailed and comprehensive explanations.

As for parents, many said the show encouraged them and their children to speak more openly about these issues. Though we did interview some who explicitly said they were happier for their children to listen to Dosh Unisher Mor than have to have an embarrassing conversation!

Clearly there’s still a real information deficit to fill around SRH and early marriage in Bangladesh. Yet our adolescent listeners told us that Dosh Unisher Mor was the only radio show out there exclusively focused on SRH. This shouldn’t be the case. Shows like Dosh Unisher Mor have so much to offer young people and there should be more programmes out there like it.

is a development professional with a background in qualitative research, specifically in the areas of public health and communication.

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Around the world, growing numbers of people have more and more access to endless distractions. . Between 2014 and 2015 alone, . Entertainment companies are increasingly global in their ambitions; take Netflix for example, which hopes to emulate the – estimated to have attracted 4 to 5 million subscribers – in a host of other countries.

In this age of media overload, you can’t simply present people with unadorned facts when trying to convince them to make healthier choices or get involved in politics. They’ll simply switch off and find something more interesting to read, watch or listen to.

Enter ‘edutainment’, the buzzword for carefully designing media both to , which is the bread and butter of what Media Action does.  

What does the cutting edge of edutainment look like?

We pioneered edutainment for HIV prevention over a decade ago with , a radio drama about a fictional Nigerian market that’s still on air today.

, we use drama to encourage people to hold their leaders to account, question why women face restrictions, and foster a sense of shared identity – among much else. We’ve consistently found that good scripts are key to keeping audiences tuning in, as well as delivering a message without preaching.

Of course, we’re not the only ones in this space. Commissioned for eight series, was the first TV series ever produced in Vanuatu. It tackled a range of issues from unemployment to government corruption to .

MTV has brought its brand to , a series that . The success of MTV Shuga shows that .

And Shuga certainly seem to be doing something right. Forty-two African countries have signed up to broadcast the latest season and it’s been the number one drama on South Africa’s biggest TV channel, SABC1, proving it can compete with commercial big-hitters.

What have evaluations proven about the value of drama?

But well-produced and fact-driven stories aside, what do edutainment programmes actually deliver in terms of measureable outcomes?

Our first-ever (RCT) can offer some answers. The trial was conducted in Bangladesh and assessed whether watching our health drama and companion discussion show influenced people. We found that . They also were more likely to believe they could make healthier choices.

, a World Bank economist deeply involved with a , has come to praise edutainment as one of the most cost-effective ways of getting people to do things differently. Conducted in Nigeria with 5,000 young people, the evaluation found that those who had watched the show in community screenings were . to think that HIV is a punishment for having multiple partners. Among women, chlamydia infections dropped by 58%.

However, the study also highlighted that viewers felt sympathy for a character who committed domestic violence. This finding demonstrates the importance of media development organisations systematically checking audience responses to their programmes.

What’s the wider significance of these results?  

Rigorous evaluation is key to building the evidence base around the role of drama in development and deciding what to scale up.

I recently attended a organised by the (DIME), which brought together government officials, academics, NGOs and the media to plan RCTs to test the effectiveness of health initiatives. Two of the five concept notes included a media component, showing growing recognition that the effectiveness of communication should be assessed.

Demonstrating the kind of impact media can have, actors from our Story Story show played out a scene about buying condoms from a local store. Hilarity ensued as the characters struggled to say the word ‘condom’ and resorted to using a range of pseudonyms instead, which the shop owner didn’t understand.  

This scene sparked a lively debate. Although the people attending the conference were from different backgrounds, nearly everyone could relate what they’d seen to their own personal experiences of nervously buying condoms in public. It’s a case in point about how stories can spark meaningful discussion of real-life issues, which might otherwise be difficult to bring up in conversation.

A lot is still unknown about the exact role of edutainment in development. How effective are public service announcements at engaging people versus street theatre? What’s the most potent combination of media interventions to improve health or boost people’s engagement with politics? The jury is still out on these questions but one thing is for sure, the big hitters of the development world are increasingly committed to finding out the answers.

 is 主播大秀 Media Action's Head of Research Programmes, overseeing research across Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Correction 27 July 2017: This blog originally noted that MTV Shuga viewers were 43% more likely to think that HIV is a punishment for having multiple partners. This has been corrected to say that they are 35% less likely.

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How we view our role and relationships within our communities shapes how we behave – . When widespread, these views constitute ‘social norms’, which people tend to follow because they believe that others do and because they think it’s expected of them. Media Action’s programmes aim to challenge social norms that can lead to people risking their health and reinforce those that support people to make healthier choices.

Donors increasingly want proof that we’re changing norms at scale. But it’s not easy either to or to identify exactly how media influences desired outcomes, such as children getting vaccinated or .

These are some of the challenges we face as Media Action’s research team. How do we design research to measure social norms and track whether they’re changing? We came up against this question when evaluating whether our had changed social norms in Ethiopia.

We set out to understand whether our programmes had convinced families to by, for example, saving money and planning how to travel to the hospital. In Ethiopia, preparing for a baby’s arrival typically means planning the important post-birth thanksgiving ceremonies. Women are judged negatively if they don’t put on a good spread but the costs of hosting this celebration mean that there’s less money to get a woman to a facility when the time comes.

We primarily used qualitative methods to understand social norms but we also undertook large-scale surveys to understand how we were shaping social norms at a population level.

To highlight challenges around researching social norms with surveys – and how they might be overcome – here are five common responses heard in the field in Ethiopia: 

1. ‘How would I know what other people think?’

Though intuitive in English, it’s not always obvious in other languages that asking someone ‘what would your neighbour think?’ really means ‘what do you think your neighbour would think?’. Respondents sometimes take the question very literally and reply that they ‘didn’t know the minds of other people’.   

, where interviewees reflect on what they understand by a question, and careful piloting of questions can reveal when something isn’t interpreted as intended. To get the wording of a question right, it’s essential to take the time to test and refine translations into local languages and carefully train field interviewers.

2. ‘Which people?’

When asked about ‘other people in the community’, interviewees often weren’t sure who they were meant to be thinking about. We consequently explained what we meant to respondents, to help them move from an amorphous sense of ‘other people’ to something more meaningful. For example: ‘If you think of five women you know, how many of them would start going for check-ups in the first three months of pregnancy?’  

3. ‘It’s none of my business!’

Our team found people in Amhara (a region in northern Ethiopia where the research took place) to be quite reserved. It’s an area where it seemed to be impolite to speculate on the lives of others, not least to an outsider with a clipboard.

Surveying was as much an art as a science, with proving to be as important as good survey design.

When it comes to rapport the ordering of questions is important. First of all, you can turn people off a survey by leading with potentially sensitive questions. How willing would you be to tell someone what you earn or weigh when you just met them?

Second, it’s easier to get good answers to tricky questions (like those around social norms) if they’re asked some way into the survey after rapport has been built. But these questions can’t be left too late. People often find talking about things like community dynamics tiring, so you have to broach these topics while people still have enough energy to discuss them.

Finally, it’s important to brief interviewers well so they’re confident of the research aims. They’ll also be better at reassuring participants they’re not trying to probe into their private lives, but rather uncover the practices and perceptions of their community as a whole.

4. ’I don’t know’   

Respondents are often stumped by questions – particularly by those that ask to what extent they agree with a given statement. However, presenting them with a range of simple and concrete options can help elicit answers.

For example, to determine whether respondents believe their community sees something as appropriate or expected, we presented them with options such as: ‘they would think it’s OK’, ‘they would think it’s not OK’ and ‘they wouldn’t care’.

To determine what respondents think people in the community are actually doing, we presented them with choices like ‘none or a few do it’ and ‘almost all do it’.

We found that listing these options helped increase understanding and made the surveys less demanding of participants, resulting in fewer ‘don’t knows’.

5. ‘Let me tell you what happened to me during my last pregnancy…’

When a respondent has to choose from a limited number of options, there’s no way of recording the rich detail someone might provide through sharing their experiences in a more narrative form. Within the context of a survey, personal stories become conundrums (how do I classify this?) rather than goldmines of information. This tension demonstrates why qualitative research remains invaluable.

Illustrating this, we recently used a to allow mothers to tell us the journey of their pregnancy. Asking questions like ‘Would you say that your story of pregnancy is the same as most of the mothers in your community?’ helped us understand whether or not interviewees were conforming to norms.

We’re continually exploring ways to improve our surveys to pinpoint what social norms are and how they’re changing, always with the aim of truly reflecting people’s perceptions and helping them improve their health.

Hilina Assefa is a Senior Research Officer with 主播大秀 Media Action’s Ethiopia team; Lois Aspinall is a Research Manager with the UK office.

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There's a lack of data on what ordinary people think, feel and want in developing countries. Our new aims to help fix that. Sonia Whitehead runs through five questions the portal can help answer on governance, media and resilience.

The development world is all aflutter about data. There’s much talk of a , the sector’s hiring and the World Bank just launched a to ‘data crunch the world’.  

Not to dampen all this excitement but we need a lot more data about people in the Global South before it can become a transformative force there. Addressing this lack of data will speed up progress on everything from to .  

Enter our new  (view on desktop), which brings together data, reports and visualisations from surveys conducted in 13 developing countries that there aren't a lot of statistics about. Over five years, we asked more than 75,000 (rarely polled) people about what they think, feel and want. The portal covers a range of issues from what they’re most worried about to how interested they are in politics.  

We want these insights to help development leaders, practitioners and researchers better understand ordinary people in the developing world so they can produce more effective strategies, projects and communications.

To mark the launch of the portal, we run through five questions that it can help answer on , and , while also showcasing the different types of content available on the portal.

1. What sources of information do people trust?

Being a media organisation, we wanted to know whether people believe what they hear on the airwaves, see on TV and read online. We found that trust levels in radio are universally high, at over 80% in , and , and reaching 90% in .

However, people are more circumspect about the truthfulness of the internet, with the , which is concerning given that say they go online in order to read the news.

To illustrate these (and other) insights into what media people think of different sources of information, we produced a series of visualisations – some of the ones for Kenya are previewed below (media visual available , governance one ): 

Bangladesh-based researcher Mahmuda Hoque explains how her team created a story about “Maya”, a 19-year-old mother, to help bring their findings about antenatal preparations to life.

Researchers often uncover insights with real practical relevance but then struggle to communicate their findings compellingly to those who can make use of them.

I came up against this predicament myself when my team here in Bangladesh surveyed 3,000 mothers, 2,000 fathers and 2,000 mothers-in-law as part of a study about maternal, newborn and child health. One of the aims of our study was to explore which factors helped pregnant women prepare sufficiently – and feel sufficiently prepared – for the birth of their child. The findings would go on to inform the .

We found that knowing what precautionary steps to take ahead of giving birth was the most important factor. The next most significant factor was discussing the issues with family and friends, followed by living in a society where it was common for families to prepare for birth, having a positive attitude and believing in one’s ability to take action.

We wanted to share our results with the project and production team as it was important for them to understand the driving forces behind birth preparedness and their relative importance. But we were worried that they wouldn’t really engage with what we’d discovered.

Bringing numbers to life

You see, we’d reached our findings using structural equation modelling (SEM), which encompasses a series of statistical methods. SEM involves creating a model of how you think factors, such as knowledge and social norms, influence behaviour and then testing it with real-life data. The SEM model is rather off-putting to a layperson due to its complexity, associated jargon (regression analysis, factor analysis, simultaneous equation modeling) and all of the lines and numbers needed to draw it out. Take a look:

Head of Research Programmes Sonia Whitehead shares her three top takeaways from the first-ever UN World Data Forum.

This week, 2,000 statisticians, researchers and policymakers from across the world gathered in Cape Town for the first-ever . Focused on data’s role in achieving the (SDGs), the conference looked at how the sector can better understand the poorest 20% (P20) of the global population. Delegates puzzled over how to better understand and engage these people in order to uphold the commitment to , which underpins the SDGs.

To do this, the discussions centred on the need for well-communicated, high quality data. The collective view was that – at a minimum – national statistics bureaus should be producing data that breaks down statistics by gender, geography, age and disability. But what more needs to be done to improve our understanding of the P20 to inform policy decisions?

There is an abundance of data being collected today by companies seeking to map consumer preferences. The rise in social media usage is also helping improve our understanding of people, supplementing traditional sources of data. But does this data support development? And how can we improve the communication of data to ensure that everyone engages with and understands it?

Along these themes, there were three points discussed at this conference that gave me particular food for thought.

1) Data guardians are changing

Anne Jellema () talked about how new players are collecting and understanding the kind of data that used to be monopolised by the state. National statistics bureaus have traditionally collected data from censuses and held administrative data on healthcare, education and employment – among much else. Governments have long been held accountable for how they use this data.

Technology, however, has shifted this state of affairs. Skype, Google Maps and Uber collect colossal amounts of user data, which doesn’t belong to the public and which their parent companies aren’t as accountable for as governments are.

This growing abundance of data could lead to a situation where data is increasingly in the hands of the few, seeking to utilise it for commercial rather than civic aims. Jellema raised this as a challenge that the data revolution needs to address in order to improve transparency, accountability and the accessibility of data.

Fortunately, we are already seeing how the proliferation of data can also empower citizens. In China, for example, the allows users to check the government’s real-time pollution data on factories near them, equipping them with the targeted information they need to push for better environmental practices locally. More than 1,800 factories are said to have taken steps to reduce pollution due to public pressure facilitated by the app, which enables users to tag violations of pollution standards on social media.

2) It's possible to collect data on people’s views – without asking one question

Collecting data on people’s views and perceptions has long been the preserve of researchers posing questions to respondents sampled in a systematic way. But there are now newer, faster ways of understanding views at scale, which don’t require a survey.  

At the time of the Zika outbreak, to analyse social media content to inform the development of a digital campaign for Brazilians. Around 100 million people in the country use Facebook and Zika was a popular topic of discussion there. Anonymised Facebook posts were analysed to reveal that 58% of posts on Zika were by men.

Equipped with these insights, UNICEF went on to produce ads featuring a man kissing his daughter born with microcephaly, in a concerted effort to engage men around its Zika campaign. The analysis also showed that people didn’t want to just hear about Zika but also wanted to know find out more about other mosquito-borne diseases.

This example highlights that in an emergency where a high proportion of the population use a particular social media platform, content analysis of posts is a good way of providing audience insights quickly. 主播大秀 Media Action also used Facebook to run short online surveys in Nepal to inform , but the Zika example shows that data on what people are concerned about can be collected without posing a single question.  

3) People don’t know Global Development 101

Has the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty changed over the last twenty years? Presented with the options of ‘almost doubled’, ‘remained more or less the same’ and ‘almost halved’, select the final of the three, which is in fact the correct one.

This pessimism about the true state of global development is not limited to the US; and got the right answer. Similar questions were posed to conference delegates by Ola Rosling (). And we were similarly downbeat about how many children are vaccinated against measles and how many years women have spent in the formal education sector. Even a bunch of statisticians fully versed in development didn’t get the answers right.  

Through its , Gapminder seeks to tackle these and other misconceptions about international development. The project is driven by a concern that the ‘actual facts’ about global progress aren’t getting through the clutter of people’s preconceptions, their tendency to generalise based their own experiences and the (likely outdated) facts they vaguely remembered having learned once in school.

Data clearly needs to be conveyed in a more engaging way so that people around the world can know the facts about topics ranging from global health to migration.

These were just some of my top takeaways; the conference also stressed the importance of breathing life into statistics with a narrative, improving everyone’s data literacy so they can engage with statistics better and giving greater weight to qualitative data about people's perceptions and values. I look forward to the next one in Dubai in two years' time!

is 主播大秀 Media Action's Head of Research Programmes, overseeing research across Africa, Asia and the Middle East.