Data-Driven Asset Mapping in Participatory Community Building with Urban Refugees
Open Access
- Author:
- Xu, Ying
- Graduate Program:
- Information Sciences and Technology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- September 11, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Carleen Frances Maitland, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Carleen Frances Maitland, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Lynette Marie Yarger, Committee Member
Frederico T Fonseca, Committee Member
Clio Maria Andris, Outside Member - Keywords:
- community building
ICTs for development
ICTD
data-driven community building
displaced population
field experiments
participatory design
social computing - Abstract:
- As the global refugee situation worsens and funding available to relieve the situation dissipates, refugees are facing unprecedented pressure to build self-reliant communities. Asset mapping, cataloging the assets a community can marshal, is gaining acceptance as a tool for community-led development. This project explores the feasibility of participatory asset mapping in refugee community building, as well as its impact on refugees’ sense of community and civic engagement. During the implementation of the project, conducted in cooperation with UNHCR and involving urban refugees living in Rwanda, we engaged refugee participants throughout the entire process of designing, implementing, analyzing, and using the asset data system. The asset system makes use of the openly accessible UNHCR Kobo server, ODK Collect and widely available mobile networks in order to guarantee secure and open access by refugees. We also trained participants on basic data science skills to help them use and replicate the data collection and management process. To investigate whether and how the asset data can be mobilized to build refugees’ own communities, we use field experiments with pre-and-post evaluations. Especially, as participatory asset mapping engages refugees in a wide range of activities with information technologies, we examine its effects on participants’ ICT self-efficacy, ‘sense of community’ and ‘civic engagement.’ Further, to explore the potential usage of the asset data in community building, we use focus groups in various sub-communities. Our results indicate participatory asset mapping can increase refugee participants’ sense of community and civic engagement. When using regression models to explore demographic and behavioral factors contributing to these key metrics, we found that ICT self-efficacy is a strong predictor for both sense of community and civic engagement, and females are more likely to have a higher level of civic engagement. The results also indicated that the usability of the asset system is strongly correlated with refugees’ perceived effectiveness in using the system to build communities. In the end, we provide insights into ICT-enabled community building activities in the following areas: community building with a displaced population, humanitarian data collection, participatory design in resource-constrained areas, as well as research in multicultural contexts. Essentially, these projects can and should include participatory design, open data, as well as data science training to enable self-reliance.