Medium posts about newcomers to protest
I wrote a blog post on Medium about my experience protesting the immigration ban at my local airport yesterday. Here it is.
29
Jan
12
Jan
Facebook in Azerbaijan, January 2017
It has been quite awhile since I last blogged about Facebook use in the Caucasus. Two interesting changes have happened: one, Facebook now also gives Instagram data and two, Facebook now reports on number of users in an average day. Thus numbers may seem lower. Again, here is a guide to how I get these data.
According to Facebook, around 980,000 Azerbaijanis are active on the site daily. That’s 10% of the total population. 14% of Azerbaijani men and 6.5% of Azerbaijani women use the site daily. As has been the trend in Azerbaijan, about twice as many men use the site as women do.
Looking at just youth, about 22% of Azerbaijanis ages 15-24 use Facebook daily. 46% of males that age and 12% of females that age. The male percentage has remained steady over the time that I’ve been looking at this, but it appears that the percentage of young women using the site has dropped. Currently, 4 times as many young men use the site than young women.
According to the same Facebook ad system, approximately 770,000 Azerbaijanis use Instagram daily – 470,000 men (10%) and 290,000 women (6%). These numbers are actually pretty close to the numbers that use Facebook.
24% of 15-24 year old Azerbaijanis use Instagram daily, 31% of young men and 17% of young women. While certainly there are likely overlaps, it does appear that Instagram is more popular than Facebook with young Azerbaijani women.
As always, these numbers are to be taken with a grain of salt.
14
Dec
Gender-based violence in Azerbaijan
A colleague asked about research on gender-based violence in Azerbaijan and I started to answer her e-mail with some results from the 2011 CRRC Social capital, media, and gender survey, but quickly realized I might as well write a blog post on this! I did an analysis on some of the gender items a number of years ago that may be of interest as well.
Gender-based violence is not my area of expertise. However, I do think that it is incredibly difficult to understand these issues through survey data. Nonetheless, the results are telling. Unfortunately I don’t have the means/SD on these, just frequencies, but if there is interest, I can report them at a later date.
I think that it would also be interesting to look at this by region (capitol, urban cities, villages) as well as by education and income level. But that is for another day. On with the results!
While over half of Azerbaijani adult respondents believed that there are not times where it is okay for a woman to be beaten…
Unsurprisingly, two-thirds of women are not keen on this, while less than half of men are.
Yet, despite the answers about there being times where a woman may deserve to be beaten, It seems that some (over a third) believe that a woman should tolerate violence in order to keep the family together.
Although it appears that women and men may slightly disagree on this point.
But when actually reporting on the practice, despite the mixed feelings about women deserving to be beaten and possibly reasons why they may deserve it, there is some evidence that people does believe that beatings are common. This graphic shows beliefs about how common both husband/partner beatings are, as well as mother-in-law beatings. The high “don’t knows” are important to acknowledge here.
When broken down by gender, many more men “don’t know” if husband beatings are occurring.
And it appears that men do not have as strong of a sense if mother-in-law beatings are occurring, which is logical.
22
Oct
Black Mirror Season 3 is here
The new season of the series Black Mirror is here. This dystopian British series is fantastic. It dealt so well with tensions related to technology in our lives that I organized my winter 2016 CommLead professional MA class around it. We watched episodes, did activities around the themes of the episode, read related pieces about the ethics of technology, and created multimedia projects creating new episodes of the show.
29
Sep
Popular media on technology and society
Over the past few years I’ve moved away from assigning scholarly work in my undergraduate classes and now most of the outside of class materials are popular media on the topic. I’ve found that a very good journalistic article on technology and society is much more likely to be read and understood than a scholarly piece. I then work theory and scholarship into my lecture on the topic and students almost always have to find and incorporate empirical pieces into their output (a project, a written assignment, a presentation, etc.)
This works especially well for me because I love longform journalism and well done videos and podcasts.
In fact, I’ve been collecting such materials for years.
Recently I decided to make my list of such materials public. And more importantly, I categorized the materials to the best of my ability.
As of September 2016, there are over 5k links here!
Please enjoy and feel free to comment.
14
Mar
Facebook in Armenia – March 2016
I’ve written some blog posts in the past where I explain how I use Facebook ads to estimate how many Facebook users there are in a particular country. Here’s a March 2016 update for Armenia!
As of mid-March 2016, there are 930,000 Facebook users in Armenia, according to Facebook. That is 31% of the total population, and 28% of the population over age 14 (Facebook technically isn’t available to those under 13.) This is a leap of 120,000 users in one year.
Women and men are pretty much equally on Facebook. There are 470,000 Armenian males on Facebook, consisting of 31% of the total male population, or 40% of males over age 14. There are 460,000 female users in Armenia, 32% of the total female population, or 33% of the female 14+ population.
Age breakdowns are possible (although please see the original post for a description of some of the difficulties in determining this). There are 160,000 13-18 year old Armenians on the site, with slightly more boys than girls. However, we do have some population data for a different age category: 15-24 year olds that is quite interesting. With 360,000 Armenian youth (15-24) on the site, we see that 82% of this age group are Facebook users! In this age group, girls are dominating, with 87% of 15-24 year old girls using Facebook and 78% of 15-24 year old boys.
23
Nov
Facebook use in Azerbaijan, November 2015
I’ve written some blog posts in the past about using Facebook’s ad data to tell us how many people use Facebook in a particular location, comparing it with World Bank population data. Please see these older post for the methods that I use.
Here’s an update. I collected this information on November 23, 2015.
In November, there were 1,500,000 Facebook users in Azerbaijan. That’s about 16% of the total population of Azerbaijan. This has not changed much throughout 2015.
Gender differences abound. In November, Facebook says that there are about 1,000,000 male Facebook users, which is about 28% of the total Azerbaijani male population. In both April and July, Facebook says that there are 510,000 Azerbaijani women on the site, about 11% of the total female Azerbaijani population. That means there are nearly 2 men on Facebook for every 1 woman (1.96 to be exact). 67% of Azerbaijani Facebook users are men, 34% are women.
When we look specifically at young people, gender imbalance is similar, although more young women are on the site certainly than older women. Of the 250,000 Azerbaijani Facebook users ages 13-18 in November, 170,000 are male and 80,000 are female, so that means there are 2.1 boys for everyone 1 girl in the teenage age ranges. We don’t have population data on this age grouping, so it is hard to compare to the total population. Note that this gender imbalance is growing larger for the 13-18 year old age group – in April and July 2015, the number of male 13-18 year old Facebook users was roughly the same, but the number of 13-18 year old Azerbaijani women has dropped from 94,000 this summer to 80,000 now.
In another categorization of young people, we again see gender differences. Of those 15-24 year old Azerbaijanis on Facebook (there are 720,000 in November), we again see gender differences. 58% of the male population of that age are on the site and 31% of the female population are, a 2:1 ratio of males:females.
We do not see these gender differences at any age level in Armenia and Georgia. Georgia is always even and Armenia is fairly close to perfectly split.
Please feel free to ask any questions and I can also play around with data on request. There is so much demographic information to mine.
16
Jul
Facebook users in April and July 2015 in Azerbaijan, according to Facebook
I’ve written some blog posts in the past about using Facebook’s ad data to tell us how many people use Facebook in a particular location, comparing it with World Bank population data.
Here’s an update. I collected this information on April 3, 2015 and July 16, 2015.
In April, there were 1,600,000 Facebook users in Azerbaijan and in July, Facebook says, there were 1,500,000. That’s about 16% of the total population of Azerbaijan.
Gender differences abound. In both April and July, Facebook says that there are about 1,000,000 male Facebook users, which is about 28% of the total Azerbaijani male population. In both April and July, Facebook says that there are 520,000 Azerbaijani women on the site, about 11% of the total female Azerbaijani population. That means there are nearly 2 men on Facebook for every 1 woman (1.92 to be exact). 67% of Azerbaijani Facebook users are men, 35% are women.
When we look specifically at young people, gender imbalance is similar, although more young women are on the site certainly than older women. Of the 280,000 (or 290,000 in April) Azerbaijani Facebook users ages 13-18, 180,000 are male and 94,000 are female, so that means there are 1.9 boys for everyone 1 girl in the teenage age ranges. We don’t have population data on this age grouping, so it is hard to compare to the total population.
However, we do have population data on 15-24 year olds. Facebook says there are 780,000 Azerbaijani Facebook users ages 15-24 as of July (810,000 in April though), which is 48% of the Azerbaijani population of that age. So almost half of all Azerbaijani youth are on the site. (For comparison though, 80% of Armenian and over 116% (double profiles surely) of Georgian 15-24 year olds are on the site, so that’s a huge difference.)
But of those 15-24 year old Azerbaijanis on Facebook, we again see gender differences. 62% of the male population of that age are on the site and 33% of the female population are, a perfect 2:1 ratio of males:females.
We do not see these gender differences at any age level in Armenia and Georgia. Georgia is always even and Armenia is fairly close to perfectly split.
Please feel free to ask any questions and I can also play around with data on request. There is so much demographic information to mine.
I’ll update with Armenia and Georgia in the coming days.
16
Feb
Qualities in a child update
I did an analysis a few years ago based on 2007 data on desirable qualities in children. The World Values Survey had a similar question, so here are the newer results. For what it is worth, I doubt that the translations are equivalent. So it is quite likely that a word for “thrift” or “obedience” that had a negative connotation was used.
This is the percent of respondents that said, yes that is an important quality in a child.
16
Feb
I hate happiness ;)
Happiness or subjective wellbeing is one of the most difficult things to measure cross-culturally. Every time I see some happiness index I cringe.
Gallup results are floating around the Internet, but here are the more transparent results from the World Values Survey. (Here’s more on WVS in the Caucasus).
Taking that into consideration, I just wanted to point out World Values Survey’s mean results per country for happiness. 1 = very happy and 4 = not at all happy:
And here are the frequencies for my two favorite countries:
