Domestic Violence (DV) is a global public health epidemic, with high physical, emotional, and economic costs. This project will develop, deploy, and test mobile-based applications to address DV.
Research Interests
We aim to use technology to provide information to women about their rights and resources available to deal with domestic violence. The project will be a randomized control trial (RCT) conducted in rural India in collaboration with an NGO where a subset of women from an identified population will receive our intervention (treatment) and their outcomes before and after will be compared to a control set of women who will not receive the intervention. Our technology platform will be an interactive voice response system (IVRS) which will connect with women via mobile phones and deliver empowering content by way of edutainment. Women will then be asked about their perceptions, attitudes, and experiences about violence. We will collect survey based data at baseline and end-line to conduct our statistical analysis. Our project will be policy relevant as it will help in uncovering the benefits and costs of a plausibly low cost way of empowering women which if successful can be scaled -up very easily.
Desired outcomes
Changes in acceptance of beating, reduction in incidence of beating, increase in reporting, reduction in physical and mental harm for women.
Student engagement
Our project will engage a full time graduate research assistant for 1 semester who will help us design the intervention and the analysis and we will also hire an undergraduate student who will be able assist us in field work during summer. In addition, we will also use this project in the development economics undergraduate seminar as a case study for experiential learning for students on how to conduct field work on sensitive topics.