RAPID: Collaborative Research: Technology Adoption during Environmental Jolts: Mobile Phone Use and Digital Services Appropriation during India's Demonetization Crisis

RAPID：合作研究：环境动荡期间的技术采用：印度废钞危机期间的手机使用和数字服务挪用

• 批准号: 1733634
• 负责人: Aditya Johri
• 金额: $ 5万
• 依托单位: George Mason University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-05-01 至 2018-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1733634&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: RAPID; Collaborative; Research; Technology; Adoption

Occasionally, events such as crises or new laws force a rapid change in the technologies people use in their daily lives. These jolts often raise concerns about peoples' access to and ability to use these new technologies, and about the stress they put on the infrastructure that supports them. This proposal studies the impacts of a rare "natural experiment" caused by the recent policy decision in India to remove certain currency from circulation, which is leading to a sudden and massive push toward the use of digital tools for managing money. The research team plans to work with students, businesspeople, and people with visual impairments in India to address two main questions: (1) how financial technologies such as phone-based payments are adopted and adapted to respond to new legal requirements; and (2) how the usability, availability, and necessity of using a given technology interact to shape its success. Better understanding of how the social and technical elements of the financial system adapt to this jolt will advance our understanding of technology infrastructures in general and inform the design of accessible technologies and technologies for contexts where financial, educational, and technology experience resources are limited. Studying this in India will provide important insights for U.S. companies looking to enter the Indian market or already operating there, and will also offer key insights on prospects and challenges in broadening the cashless economy in the U.S. The project will also provide educational experiences that cross both intellectual and national borders that will help train a diverse and globally competitive STEM workforce.Based on an integration of ICTD and infrastructure studies, this project will develop better understanding of how people adapt to technology in forced or deterministic contexts. The team will study and compare three different user populations: 1) college students; 2) people working in the informal sector; and 3) people with visual impairments. These populations were chosen to highlight different aspects of the broader population: college students are less reliant on the cash economy and more educated; those in the informal sector are more cash-reliant and less educated; and those with visual impairments may gain transactional benefits from not having to handle cash, but also have to overcome inaccessibility of mainstream technology. The research will employ a two-stage plan that starts with interviews to capture nuance and inform questions that can be asked in a second, survey stage; the team plans to conduct the research twice, once in the first 6 months and again (with improvements based on the first round) in the last 3 months of the year-long project, to capture both relatively fresh and longitudinal experiences of the jolt. Leveraging existing relationships with payment providers, visually impaired groups, and informal workers, the researchers will study the ecosystem of payment technologies people use, the ways their specific design affects people's ability to use them, and how their social network both supports (through intermediation) and affects (through network effects) the ways they can use those technologies. This will provide lessons for understanding and improving innovation and technology use in marginalized communities, lessons that may transfer to other contexts such as the rapid adoption of mobile health apps and the use of technology in natural disaster situations.

有时，危机或新法律等事件会迫使人们在日常生活中使用的技术发生快速变化。 这些震动常常引起人们对人们获得和使用这些新技术的能力的担忧，以及他们对支持这些新技术的基础设施施加的压力的担忧。 该提案研究了印度最近取消某些货币流通的政策决定所造成的罕见“自然实验”的影响，该决定导致突然大规模推动使用数字工具来管理资金。 研究团队计划与印度的学生、商人和视力障碍人士合作，解决两个主要问题：（1）如何采用和调整电话支付等金融技术来应对新的法律要求； (2) 使用特定技术的可用性、可用性和必要性如何相互作用以塑造其成功。 更好地了解金融体系的社会和技术要素如何适应这种冲击，将增进我们对技术基础设施的总体理解，并为金融、教育和技术经验资源有限的环境下的无障碍技术和技术的设计提供信息。在印度进行这一研究将为希望进入印度市场或已经在那里运营的美国公司提供重要的见解，还将提供有关扩大美国无现金经济的前景和挑战的重要见解。该项目还将提供跨印度和印度市场的教育经验知识和国家边界，将有助于培训一支多元化且具有全球竞争力的 STEM 劳动力。基于 ICTD 和基础设施研究的整合，该项目将更好地了解人们如何在强制或确定性环境中适应技术。该团队将研究和比较三种不同的用户群体：1）大学生； 2) 在非正规部门工作的人员； 3) 有视力障碍的人。 选择这些人群是为了突出更广泛人群的不同方面：大学生对现金经济的依赖程度较低，受教育程度更高；非正规部门的人员更加依赖现金且受教育程度较低；那些有视力障碍的人可能会因为不必处理现金而获得交易利益，但也必须克服主流技术的难以获得性。该研究将采用一个两阶段计划，从访谈开始，以捕捉细微差别并告知可以在第二个调查阶段提出的问题；该团队计划进行两次研究，一次在前 6 个月，另一次（在第一轮的基础上进行改进）在为期一年的项目的最后 3 个月，以捕捉相对新鲜和纵向的颠簸体验。 利用与支付提供商、视障群体和非正式工人的现有关系，研究人员将研究人们使用的支付技术的生态系统、其具体设计如何影响人们使用它们的能力，以及他们的社交网络如何支持（通过中介）并影响（通过网络效应）他们使用这些技术的方式。这将为理解和改善边缘化社区的创新和技术使用提供经验教训，这些经验教训可能会转移到其他环境，例如移动健康应用程序的快速采用以及在自然灾害情况下使用技术。

项目成果

Digital Payment and Its Discontents: Street Shops and the Indian Government's Push for Cashless Transactions

数字支付及其不满：街头商店和印度政府推动无现金交易

• DOI: 10.1145/3173574.3173803
• 发表时间: 2018-04-21
• 期刊: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• 作者: J. Pal;Priyank Ch;ra;ra;Vaishnav Kameswaran;Aakanksha Parameshwar;Sneha Joshi;A. Johri
• 通讯作者: A. Johri

Cashing out: digital payments and resilience post-demonetization

兑现：数字支付和非货币化后的恢复力

• DOI: 10.1145/3287098.3287103
• 发表时间: 2019-01
• 期刊: Proceeding of ICTD 2019
• 作者: Krishnan, Nanjundi Karthick;Johri, Aditya;Chandrasekaran, Ramgopal;Pal, Joyojeet
• 通讯作者: Pal, Joyojeet