Comments on: Mobile Phones: Does the Intrahousehold Allocation of Technology Matter?

By: Marc F. Bellemare

Marc F. Bellemare — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 19:33:30 +0000

Thanks for your comment, Leo. I’m glad you guys are also looking at this, given the seeming importance of the intrahousehold allocation of technology.

By: Leo Tobias

Leo Tobias — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 16:50:39 +0000

Very interesting issue to shed light on. We’ve just completed a baseline survey of participants for a Mobile Financial Services pilot with a microfinance institution in the Philippines. Our small sample revealed 78 % participant/ 98% household ownership of handsets. We hope to gain some insight on any differences in adoption, behavior and attitudes of the users over time. This isn’t the main focus of the pilot but I suspect it will yield interesting and actionable results.

By: Mobile phones, toilets and libraries – beyond access « Wait… What?

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 12:27:27 +0000

[...] is that the mobile access/mobile phones referred to are not necessarily equally distributed. A recent blog post by Marc Bellemare refers to a study he worked on (with Ken Lee) called “Look Who’s Talking: The Impacts of the [...]

By: Marc F. Bellemare

Marc F. Bellemare — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 13:30:43 +0000

Thank you for your comment, Agnes! I am honored that you actually are reading this, as our work builds upon yours. I’m glad asset ownership is being recorded, and that this is increasingly the case with cell phones. I am looking forward to see if the intrahousehold allocation of mobile phones matters in other contexts, such as mobile banking, health information, and so on.

By: Agnes Quisumbing

Agnes Quisumbing — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 01:57:23 +0000

If we all collected individual level asset data, as Cheryl Doss and colleagues suggest, we would have data on who within the household owns mobile phones! In our surveys in Bangladesh, our asset modules have an additional column for the owner of the asset, and we just use the ID from the household roster. Mobile phones were not an important asset in our surveys 15 years ago, but they sure are now! (And I must admit that when I am in the Philippines, where I am from originally, I am a Luddite when it comes to advanced texting).