Brooke Foucault Welles and Christoph Riedl have received a seed grant from Northeastern. The proposal was titled "Team Communication Unpacked: A Pilot Study of Team Communication Process and Performance Captured in a Smart Meeting Room".
Project description: Team communication processes are notoriously difficult to study in the field, requiring invasive recording equipment and/or extensive hand coding that reduced data quality. Building on a successful program of online teams research that we developed to partially address these challenges, we will conduct team decision making studies in a state-of-the art Smart Meeting Room, designed to unobtrusively and dynamically collect team process data. These data will allow us to validate (or identify limitations) in our existing (online) teams data, and offer a proof-of-concept for future studies using Smart Meeting Rooms to study team processes and performance.
David Lazer has also received a seed grant for a proposal titled "Networks and Global Health: Experimental Evidence of Women’s Social Networks, Reproductive Health, and Well-Being in Developing Countries"
Project description: We seek support to implement a pilot of a randomized control trial that will explore the causal impact of a social network-based family planning intervention on young women’s contraceptive use, reproductive health, fertility and well-being in rural India. Our proposed intervention consists of a Groupon®-inspired “bring-a-friend” family planning voucher package that exploits young women's social networks to reduce stigma-related barriers and to improve access to high-quality family planning services. Our project aims to identify innovative and cost-effective strategies for delivering reproductive health services through social networks in low-income settings. This pilot project will showcase the high-impact research potential at the intersection of the Northeastern’s Network Science Institute and the Gender and Development Initiative which will enhance future applications to international funding organizations in the fields of Global Health, Development Economics and Network Science.
