Deference, Dissent, and Dispute Resolution: An Experimental Intervention Using Mass Media to Change Norms and Behavior in Rwanda

We selected 14 research sites to represent salient political, economic, and ethnic categories of present-day Rwanda: two genocide survivor communities (mostly Tutsi), two Twa communities (the Pygmy minority), two prisons, and eight general population communities from the four general provincial regions of Rwanda. Because prison, survivor, and Twa communities are relatively scarce and scattered across the country, we worked through the prison system and Twa and survivor advocacy groups to obtain demographic, socioeconomic, and detainee characteristics (for the prisons) for a range of sites, and we chose the two most similar sites of each community type, even if they were located in different provinces... We chose each general population community site on the basis of its accessibility by paved or dirt road (we eliminated sites unavailable by road for logistical reasons), and on the quality of its demographic and socioeconomic match with another site in the region, a site far enough away that the communities did not share markets (to prevent spillover) but close enough to be similar on a range of characteristics. We used Rwandan census data to match the sites, including gender ratio, quality of dwellings, religion, and education level.