Event

Guest talk by Donald P. Green:

“Countering Violence Against Women When State Capacity is Low: Edutainment and the promotion of bystander intervention in rural Uganda"

Info about event

Time

Wednesday 10 May 2017,  at 14:30 - 16:00

Location

Large Meeting room (1330-126)

Professor Donald P. Green from Columbia University will visit the department and give a talk. Don Green is among the most widely cited contemporary political scientists and he has contributed to research in a variety of domains, including the promotion and development of field experiments in political science. 

Don Green will give a talk titled, “Countering Violence Against Women When State Capacity is Low: Edutainment and the promotion of bystander intervention in rural Uganda” which will include both substantive and methodological innovations that professor Green will present (see abstract below). 

Abstract
Intimate partner violence (IPV) affects tens of millions of women worldwide each year, particularly in societies with low state capacity. In addition to lacking police resources, such societies often treat the home as a private sphere outside of government’s purview. When violence against women occurs within the home, their protection depends on informal action by family members, neighbors, or local leaders.

Yet widespread social norms often discourage informal intervention and portray violence against women as legitimate or necessary.

The current study, set in rural Uganda, assesses a mass media campaign designed to strengthen pro-intervention norms and attitudes. Two large-scale placebo-controlled experiments in 2015 and 2016 exposed Ugandans to a sequence of three short video dramatizations of IPV using local actors. The videos encouraged family, neighbors, and local leaders to intervene to prevent IPV from escalating.

The effects of these videos on villagers’ attitudes, behavioral orientations, and reported behavior were measured two months after each intervention through two seemingly unrelated surveys with a combined total of over 7,500 households and 320 village health workers.

The results suggest that the video vignettes generated substantial and enduring effects for both men and women. The intervention had especially strong effects on villagers’ willingness to intervene and their perception that their community regards such intervention as appropriate.