Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences Sample Proposal

Problem statement
Impending water shortages and conflicts over scarce water are now widely predicted (Ohlsson 1995, Elhance 1999). Ross (1993) has shown that the presence of cooperative ties within a community mitigates both the incidence and the intensity of conflict. Laughlin and Brady argue that if resource scarcity becomes severe enough, cooperative ties will break down as people focus on their own needs, and withdraw from reciprocal exchange relationships and social relationships. This theory produces a series of testable hypotheses. The proposed research will determine if severe water scarcity erodes reciprocal exchange and social relationships in Villa Israel, a barrio of Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Methods and Analysis
Between January and April, the researcher will select a 60-household purposive sample, create and test interview protocols, choose key informants, and train a research assistant. Between May and November, the researcher will conduct in-depth interviews with key informants and four ethnographic interviews with each household in the sample. In November and December, the researcher will conduct a series of experimental economic games will be run to determine the norms of trust and reciprocity in the community. Inferential statistics Πt-tests, ANOVA, and repeated measures ANOVA Πwill be used to test the hypotheses.

Intellectual Merit
This research will contribute to two areas of social science inquiry: urban anthropology and conflict theory. This will be the first study to examine if and how urban social support relationships are transformed by severe water scarcity. Understanding how reciprocal exchange and social ties are strained during periods of severe deprivation will contribute to efforts to understand the dynamics involved in conflict over environmental resources.

Broader Impacts
This research will contribute to the doctoral training of a female doctoral student, as well as the methods training of a Bolivian undergraduate student from the Universidad Mayor de San Simón in Cochabamba. The study also has practical applications for those seeking to anticipate and manage coming conflicts over scarce freshwater. By determining when and how social ties become vulnerable during periods of severe water scarcity, the research will point to possible avenues for conflict prevention in marginal urban communities. In Cochabamba, the researcher will disseminate her findings to three local NGOs and will suggest how the research might contribute to the success of future water delivery projects.

Reports on the state of freshwater reserves warn that severe local shortages are imminent, and predict that violent conflicts will emerge in water-scarce regions (Ohlsson 1995, Elhance 1999). Water scarcity has been shown to cause civil conflict, particularly when accompanied by high population density, poverty, and income inequality (Homer-Dixon 1994, 1996, Hauge and Ellingsen 1998). Urban migrant communities, where ethnic, religious, and class differences can exacerbate tensions, and community-wide patterns of adaptation to environmental scarcities are not well-formed, may be particularly vulnerable to water conflicts (Moench 2002). To better understand how conflicts develop in water-scarce regions, research is needed on the social and economic factors that mediate cooperation and conflict (Ronnfeldt 1997). I propose to do an in- depth study of Villa Israel, a barrio of Cochabamba, Bolivia, where conflict over water is an established part of life. Every winter, seasonal water shortages threaten the lives of the people of Villa Israel, forcing them to make choices in how they use their economic and social resources.

One factor that mitigates the incidence and intensity of conflicts is the existence of cooperative ties within a community (Ross 1993). In marginal urban settings, poverty and mutual assistance foster social support networks (Low 1999) that strengthen community ties. However, Laughlin and Brady's model (1978) of adaptation to environmental stress predicts that, in times of severe resource scarcity, individuals will withdraw from the generalized reciprocal exchange relationships and social relationships that characterize urban social support networks. The proposed research in Villa Israel will test the Laughlin and Brady model to determine if severe water scarcity erodes reciprocal exchange and social relationships.

The overall objective is to understand how severe water scarcity affects reciprocal exchange relationships and social relationships in a marginal urban setting. The five specific objectives are:

• to document the incidence of water scarcity in the research community. This involves the development and testing of a scale to assess water consumption, as well as conducting interviews to document variation of water use in a sample of households.
• to determine how water scarcity affects the frequency and quality of reciprocal exchanges between households. This involves documenting the reciprocal exchanges that a sample of households engages in over a nine-month period.
• to determine how water scarcity affects the frequency and quality of social interactions between households. This involves documenting the social interactions that a sample of households engages in over a nine-month period.
• to determine if community norms exist for determining the order in which households withdraw from reciprocal exchange relationships. This involves testing how economic interactions change under a variety of hypothetical conditions in an experimental game.
• to determine if households withdraw from reciprocal exchange and social relationships in the order established by community norms.

The existence and quality of intracommunity ties has long been recognized as a factor that determines how conflicts evolve over scarce resources and other threats (Simmel 1904 [1955], Coser 1956, Mack 1965). The degree of connectedness and the presence of ties that cross social segments are both elements of social structure that inhibit conflict development (Gluckman in Ross 1993, LeVine and Campbell 1972). Although early conflict theorists called for empirical research to investigate when and in what order social ties are broken (Coleman 1957), such studies have been conducted in only a few geographic regions and on a few environmental scarcities.

Laughlin and Brady's (1978) model of adaptation describes how economic and social interactions fluctuate with seasonal patterns of resource scarcity. They hypothesize that, during times of widespread (but non-lethal) deprivation, households will increase generalized reciprocal exchanges and social interactions. When resource scarcity becomes more severe, households will shift to balanced or negative reciprocal exchanges and will withdraw from social relationships.

Dirks (1980) demonstrated that, whether famines are seasonal or unpredictable, societies pass from an initial stage of alarm (characterized by intensified sharing and sociability) to resistance (characterized by economic and social withdrawal into households and kin groups) to exhaustion (in which kin-based alliances to find food disintegrate) as scarcity worsens. Laughlin and Brady's model was validated by a series of African famine case studies (Laughlin 1974, Cashdan 1985, Corbett 1988, Walker 1989).

Similar to the survival tactics documented in rural African households, urban Andean households engage in frequent reciprocal exchanges to guard against privation. For the purposes of this research, the social support networks of impoverished urban communities are considered to be characteristic of the first stage of response to deprivation. The anthropological literature on Andean survival strategies indicates that people form mutual support relationships based on five major kinds of ties: kin, compadrazgo, paisano, work, and church.

One of the most powerful cooperative strategies that urban migrants use to survive is to form kin-based groups (Halebsky 1995). In the Andes, the basic units for such groups are nuclear and extended households (Lobo 1995 [1982]). Beyond the household, ties with extended families and fictive kin constitute the heart of Andean support networks. In Lima, groups of siblings and cousins migrated together from the highlands. These siblings formed powerful core groups, which they later augmented with marriage alliances (Lobo 1995 [1982]). Familial support is also enhanced with compadrazgo ties, in which ceremonial parents establish relationships for mutual aid with their fictive children (Isbell 1985 [1978]). In addition, paisanos, or people who came from the same highland district, are relied upon to help and defend each other in urban settlements (Lobo 1995 [1982]). Similarly, in Mexico City, kinship, compadrazgo, and informal social networks provided services, goods, and information that were crucial to the survival of residents of a shantytown (Lomnitz 1977).

Andean communities also tend to have strong traditions of mutual support founded on work- based solidarity (Buechler and Buechler 1971). In urban settlements, such ties of mutual support may be formed around cooperative welfare projects (McFarren 1992), union membership or shared professions (Nash 1993 [1979]), and camaraderie established while women do housework or work in markets (Weismantel 2001).

Churches provide another setting in which mutual support relationships are formed (Krause et al. 2001). Regardless of the denomination, parishioners generally belong to church organizations that provide assistance to needy community members, and form informal assistance networks among themselves. One particularly important form of reciprocity is the obligation to provide goods and labor to kin and fictive kin during Catholic festivals (Isbell 1985 [1978]). Protestants, lacking a system of festival-based reciprocity, form informal social support networks to provide goods and services to churchgoers (cf. Stewart-Gambino and Wilson 1997).

While the supportive elements of Latin American urban networks have been extensively documented, the effects of severe resource scarcity on urban networks remain unexplored. Lomnitz (1978) suggested that extreme deprivation would likely cause decrement of generalized reciprocal exchanges and social interactions in urban areas. Still, no empirical research has tested the effects of drought or severe water scarcity on urban support ties.

Assuming that all households engage in exchange and social relationships, and that the amount of water available to the households varies, I propose ten hypotheses:

• H1. Generalized reciprocal exchanges will occur more frequently in the wet season than in the dry season.
• H2. Social interactions will occur more frequently in the wet season than in the dry season.
• H3. During the dry season, households with more water will engage in more generalized reciprocal exchanges than will households with less water.
• H4. During the dry season, households with more water will engage in generalized reciprocal exchange relationships with more households than will households with less water.
• H5. During the dry season, households with more water will engage in more social interactions than will households with less water.
• H6. During the dry season, households with more water will engage in social relationships with more households than will households with less water.
• H7. People will trust partners to reciprocate under experimental conditions most if they believe partners are kin, followed by compadres, then paisanos, then co-workers, and finally co-parishioners.
• H8. People will reciprocate under experimental conditions most if they believe partners are kin, followed by compadres, then paisanos, then co-workers, and finally co-parishioners.
• H9. During the dry season, households will withdraw from generalized reciprocal exchange relationships in the order predicted by the experimental game.
• H10. During the dry season, households will withdraw from social relationships in the order predicted by the experimental game.

The research will proceed in two phases. During the first phase, I will use a sampling frame to choose a 60-household purposive sample, create and test interview protocols, choose key informants, and train a research assistant. The first phase will lay the groundwork for the second, so that I will be prepared to complete a baseline assessment of exchange and social interactions before the dry season begins in May. During the second phase, I will conduct in-depth interviews with key informants and four ethnographic interviews with each household in the sample. At the end of the second phase, I will conduct a series of experimental economic games to determine the norms of trust and reciprocity in the community.

The research design has several strengths. First, ethnographic study will yield data with high internal validity about how responses to water scarcity evolve over the wet-to-dry cycle (Kirk and Miller 1986). Second, the household interviews allow me to document change by collecting repeated measurements of household characteristics over time. Third, interviews with key informants allow me to collect information with more time depth than would be available with only the household interviews. Fourth, the experimental game allows me to determine how certain ties affect trust and reciprocity, controlling for other factors like history. Finally, the use of three forms of data collection Πhousehold interviews, interviews with key informants, and an experimental game Πwill enable me to check the results of each method against the other, facilitating identification of sample biases, hoax answers, or other data problems.

Research Schedule

Research Site: Villa Israel, Cochabamba, Bolivia
Cochabamba is a large Bolivian city located in a semi-arid zone, made famous in 2000 by city-wide protests and riots over water delivery. There, a rapid increase in water demand caused by urban growth, groundwater scarcity, and topography that drains water away from the city have intensified pressures on the municipal water distribution system (Laurie and Marvin 1999). Lacking the capital to extend water services to its growing periphery, Cochabamba contains a large population of marginal urban residents that lack access to the municipal water system.

Villa Israel, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Cochabamba, is an impoverished community of 565 migrant families. The population contains people of Quechua and Aymara origin, and members of four different Catholic and Protestant churches. Currently, Villa Israel has no municipal water or sanitation services. Most households buy drinking water from a truck, which is operated by a private vendor. Private vendors typically charge 10 to 20 times the fee charged by public utilities, and people living in marginal urban areas pay between 10 and 40 percent of their incomes to acquire water in this way (Marvin and Laurie 1999). Households may purchase between 20 and 40 liters of low-cost, untreated water a day through thirteen public faucets controlled by the Unión Cristiana Evangélica, a Protestant church (Trujillo 2002). During the wet season, households also collect rainfall and water from canal beds used to drain sewage and wastewater. The ability of a household to acquire sufficient water depends on its per capita income and its exchange relationships with other households. Throughout the year, all households lack sufficient water for daily sanitation tasks in Villa Israel. As the winter dry season progresses, the impacts of water scarcity become increasingly severe. For example, between April and July of 2002, fourteen children under the age of one died from water-related illnesses (Trujillo 2002).

Data collection
Sampling and choosing key informants Using the Unión Cristiana Evangélica census of Villa Israel as a sample frame, I will select a purposive sample of 60 households. Households will be selected to maximize variation on the following variables: ethnicity, religious affiliation, head of household's profession, number of members, and geographic location of the house (distance from water sources). Although choosing a purposive sample renders generalization from the study impossible, the purposive sample will enable me to choose households that maximize variation on the independent variables (Bernard 2002). A sample of 60 is small enough so that, with the help of a research assistant, I can do rigorous, in-depth study of the sample, and I also have enough observations to do inferential statistics to test the hypotheses.

Upon entering the field, I will also begin to look for key informants through word-of-mouth recommendations. I will attempt to find key informants using an a priori analytic framework (Johnson 1990), that is, based on the characteristics that will give informants access to different experiences in the community (ethnicity, religion, profession, age, and gender). Having several key informants will allow me to check their recollections and assessments of norms against each other.

Measurement of water availability
To determine when the wet and dry seasons begin and end (independent variables H1-2), I will consult published records of precipitation in Cochabamba for 2004. To determine the amount of water available to each household at each interview time (independent variables H4-6), I will use a Guttman scale. Attempts to physically measure the volume of water acquired by the household from all sources may result in serious measurement errors. Instead, I will develop a Guttman scale of water use (Guttman 1950). First, I will elicit free lists of water uses from adult women and prepare a list of, say, the 20 most commonly listed items (the exact number will be determined by examining the data, of course, for repetitions of items.). Next, I will determine which tasks appear be part of a common water use domain. To do this, I will ask 20 women to indicate which of the tasks on the streamlined list (e.g., drinking, washing windows, bathing, watering plants, and cooking) each household member has completed in the last day and in the last week. I will then create two scales (for weekly and daily use), calculating the coefficient of reproducibility (CR Πthe statistic that summarizes errors in the scale), for each. If the CR is greater than .85, I will consider water use to scale sufficiently (Bernard 2002). I will then use the modal household water use to represent overall water availability in the household. If water use does not scale, I will collect measures of the volume of water acquired by each household from all sources at the time of each interview, and will also ask the person responsible for collecting water to assess how much water was collected that day. Household interviews Household interviews will produce data for the following variables: number of reciprocal exchanges (H1,3), number of reciprocal exchange relationships (H4), number of social visits (H2,5), and number of social relationships (H6) that each household has reinforced (through visits, for example) during the week preceding each interview; and the order in which households withdraw from exchange and social relationships (H9-10). I will conduct one interview every two months with each of the 60 households in the purposive sample. The interview will be conducted primarily with the adult responsible for housekeeping, but I will verify responses with other household members during the interview. Each household will be allocated 4 to 8 hours per meeting for interviewing and observation. Because residents of marginal Cochabamban neighborhoods tend to mistrust and avoid researchers with structured survey protocols (Goldstein 2002), I will conduct informal, semi-structured interviews with household members. With respondents' permission, I will record interviews using a digital sound recorder (Maloney and Paolisso 2001). I will take detailed field notes and observations using Spradley's method for note-taking (1980). In interviews with key informants, I will also supplement field notes with digital sound recording whenever possible.

For the semi-structured interviews, I will adapt the interview protocol from Stack's classic study of urban survival strategies (1970) for use in Cochabamba (see appendix). To do so, I will translate the protocol with a bilingual Spanish-English speaker, and pre-test the protocol with households outside the sample. The protocol includes questions about daily life, the acquisition of goods, finances, and leisure time. The advantages of using a modified version of the Stack protocol are that it has been pre-tested for research on urban survival strategies, it is flexible enough to accommodate Andean social structure, and successful replication of Stack's results will enhance the external validity of previous findings about how urban support systems function. In interviews with key informants, I will expand on the household interview protocol, and will probe for anecdotes about times when ties have been broken or when people have come into conflict over water.

Experimental game
Following anthropologists who have modified experimental economic methods to study economic behaviors in 15 small-scale societies (Henrich et al. 2001), I will use an investment game (Berg et al. 1995) to discover the social norms that determine when and with whom households trust (dependent variable H7) and reciprocate (dependent variable H8). I will set up the games using Barr's (2001) adaptation of the investment game protocol and script for developing nations. The game is an anonymous, one-time economic interaction between two people that uses real money. Player A is given a sum equal to one day's labor (about US $3), and the option to keep the money or send some of it to the player B. If the money is sent to player B, it triples and player B determines how much of the money should be returned to player A. The amount of money offered by player A indicates how much A trusts B, and the amount B returns to A is a measure of reciprocity (Berg et al. 1995). By informing players A and B that the otherwise anonymous opposing player shares kin, compadrazgo, paisano, work, or religious affiliation, the experiment can be manipulated to test the strength of trust and reciprocity for each tie. I will conduct 60 repetitions of each interaction for each scenario, totaling 360 repetitions.

Data entry and coding
Interviews will be transcribed by the field assistant as they are conducted. Data from the interviews will be used to construct an ordinal measure of water use (H4-6) and four interval-level dependent variables: the number of generalized reciprocal exchanges that occurred in the last week (H1,3), the number of households with which the respondents exchanged in the last week (H4), the number of social visits that occurred in the last week (H2,5), the number of households with which the respondents visited in the last week (H6). The amount of offers (H7) and counter-offers (H8) made during the investment game will be recorded in Bolivianos. Quantitative data for households will be entered directly into Excel spreadsheets.

Inferential statistics
I will use t-tests to compare mean numbers of exchange and social interactions for the wet and dry season (H1, H2), and ANOVA to determine if levels of household water availability are associated with differences in mean levels of exchange and interaction (H3-H6). Analysis of variance tests will also be used to determine if different social ties are associated with differences in mean monetary measures of trust and reciprocity (H7, H8). I will use repeated measures ANOVA to test hypotheses 9 and 10.

Analysis of ethnographic data
Field notes and transcribed narratives that include anecdotes about tie breaking and water conflicts will be coded to indicate if the case supports or disproves any of the hypotheses. I will examine each case to better understand the dynamics of tie breakage and water conflicts.

Preliminary Studies
In summer 2002, I traveled to Bolivia to conduct preliminary fieldwork and establish relationships with institutions that support this study. I interviewed project coordinators in USAID, CARE, the Peace Corps, and Bolivian NGOs to learn about how communities adapt to conditions of water scarcity. After the interviews, I determined that Villa Israel would be an ideal site to test the research question.

In Cochabamba, I became associated with three organizations that are working on local water problems. The first, The Democracy Center, is a Cochabamba-based organization that works to strengthen the advocacy efforts of community groups. The second organization, Water for People, is an international NGO that helps communities in Cochabamba that lack adequate water delivery install wells, hand pumps, and sanitation systems. The third is the Unión Cristiana Evangélica church, which manages the distribution of water through tap stands in Villa Israel. Each of these organizations has provided me with valuable information about the water situation, introductions to key community leaders in Cochabamba and Villa Israel, and has pledged to support me during the year-long data collection project. Since my return from Bolivia, I have stayed in frequent contact with representatives of the three organizations, and continue to receive data and consult with them on logistics of conducting research and living in Villa Israel. During summer of 2003, I will return to Villa Israel to introduce myself formally to community members, hire a research assistant from the sociology department at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón, and finalize living arrangements for the following January.

Research Competence of the Student
Over six years of coursework, I have acquired a solid four-field education in anthropology that enables me to understand the cultural, biological, historical, and symbolic aspects of water scarcity and conflict. My preparation for this research includes coursework in the following subjects: research design and cognitive research methods with Dr. H. Russell Bernard, economic anthropology and studies of race and ethnicity with Dr. Anthony Oliver-Smith, political ecology and development in the tropics with Dr. Marianne Schmink, and anthropological theory with Dr. Maxine Margolis. During spring 2003, I will take a fourth course in statistics, as well as a course in hydrology. I supplemented graduate coursework with an intensive six-week language course in Oaxaca, Mexico during the summer of 2000, in which I polished the Spanish skills I acquired studying and working in South Florida between 1992 and 1996.

While assisting Drs. H. Russell Bernard and Christopher McCarty in research projects between 1997 and 2002, I honed my skills in sampling, questionnaire design, data collection and data analysis. Under Dr. Bernard's direction, I have conducted ethnographic interviews, transcribed narratives, and done text analysis, social network analysis, and multivariate analyses. I currently manage data collection and analysis for the Survey Research Center at the UF Bureau of Economic and Business Research under the supervision of Dr. McCarty. My responsibilities include overseeing a four-survey evaluation of health care in the state of Florida, which involves 300 interviewers and 13,500 interviews. After five years of practice and hands-on instruction in ethnographic and survey research methods, I have become an experienced and capable researcher.

I have also conducted three independent research projects in cities and marginal urban areas. Two of these projects took place in Mexico and Bolivia, where I honed my ability to do research in Spanish. In 2001, I conducted a study on the effects of social support networks on child feeding decisions with the Mexican Social Security Institute in Oaxaca. In 2002, I traveled to Bolivia to conduct preliminary fieldwork and establish relationships with institutions that support my work. When I return to Bolivia in January 2004, I will have the experience, knowledge, and local support to successfully conduct the proposed research.

Intellectual Merit
This research will contribute to two areas of social science inquiry: urban anthropology and environment-conflict theory. The research will be the first study to examine if and how urban social support relationships are transformed by severe water scarcity. Understanding how reciprocal exchange and social ties are strained during periods of severe deprivation will contribute to efforts to understand the dynamics involved in conflict over environmental resources.

Through in-depth study of one case, the research will produce data with high internal validity. This is particularly important because the research examines the process of withdrawal from reciprocal exchange and social relationships. In using Stack's ethnographic interview protocol and Berg et al.'s experimental investment game, the proposed research replicates well-known research, and facilitates future replications to establish the external validity of the findings.

Broader Impacts
In addition to testing the effects of water scarcity on reciprocity and sociability, the research will facilitate the learning of two students. The proposed research will contribute to the doctoral training of a female graduate student, as well as the methods training of a Bolivian undergraduate from the Universidad Mayor de San Simón in Cochabamba.

The study also has practical applications for those seeking to anticipate and manage coming conflicts over scarce freshwater. In many Latin American cities, the arrival of new immigrants strains the ability of the local government to provide municipal services to all city residents (Gilbert 1998). By determining when and how social ties become vulnerable during periods of severe water scarcity, the research will point to possible avenues for conflict prevention in marginal urban communities. In Cochabamba, the study's findings will be disseminated through partnerships with three local NGOs, along with suggestions regarding ways in which the research might contribute to the success of future water delivery projects.

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Gilbert, Alan
1998 The Latin American City. London: The Latin American Bureau.

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Professional Preparation

University of Florida, Anthropology (specialization in Tropical Conservation and Development in Latin American Studies), Doctoral program , September 2000-curr.
Español Interactivo, Spanish language classes, May-June 2000
University of Florida, Anthropology and Chinese Language and Literature, B.A., May 2002 Honors thesis in cultural anthropology
Shaanxi Teacher’s University, Chinese Language and Literature, Aug. 1998-May 1999

Appointments: Employment and Research Experience

2002 Preliminary fieldwork, interviews on water scarcity in Bolivia
2002 Project manager, led data collection and analysis on a study of ethnicity and social support funded by the University of Florida
2000-02 Survey research, supervised sampling, data collection and analysis on a series of surveys for the state of Florida at UF Bureau of Economic and Business Research Survey Research Center 2002 Text analysis, performed text analysis on a project for Dr. H.R. Bernard
2001 Field Research, The Effect of Social Support Networks on Oaxacan Mothers’ Weaning Decisions (with the Mexican Social Security Institute, Oaxaca, Mexico)
2000 Interviewer, Ford-funded Web Research Materials Project, a project to develop web-based cognitive research tools Undergraduate Honors Research, The Effects of Estimation on Elicitation in Social Network Research
1999 Undergraduate Research, study of information networks in Xi’an, China
1998 NSF Research Education for Undergraduates grant, to study the estimation of hard-to-count populations with Russ Bernard

Paper Presentations

2003 (under review) Presenter, “Using personal networks to measure race and ethnicity” Sunbelt Social Networks Conference, Cancun, Mexico
(under review) Panel Co-Organizer, Measuring Race and Ethnicity in Anthropology and Beyond; Presenter, “A Social Network Approach To Measuring Race and Ethnicity” Society for Applied Anthropology Conference, Portland, OR
2002 Presenter, “Getting Health Care Advice on Her Own: Social Network Effects on Weaning Decisions in Oaxaca, Mexico" Society for Applied Anthropology Conference, Atlanta, GA
2001 Presenter, “Living Local and Going Global: Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Methods in a Study of Internet Use in Xi'an, China" Society for Applied Anthropology Conference, Merida, Mexico

Collaborators:
Christopher McCarty (U. Florida), Clarence Gravlee (U. Michigan)

Graduate Advisors:
H. Russell Bernard (U. Florida), Anthony Oliver-Smith (U. Florida), Marianne Schmink (U. Florida)

1. DAILY LIVES
My aim is to learn how people spend their time from the moment they wake up in the morning until they go to bed at night -- to learn who they visit, which relatives they see daily or weekly, what they do for each other, whether they exchange goods and services, and how these exchanges are arranged. a. Describe a typical day in great detail. (Probe repeatedly.) b. Who do you visit each day, each week? Which relatives? (Name relationship) c. Did you trade food, money, child care, or anything else with anyone this week? With whom? d. What did you do for someone else this week? Did anyone help you out? e. Did you give anything (goods/services) to any of the individuals listed in d?
Did you receive anything (goods/services) from the individuals listed in d?

2. THE ACQUISITION OF GOODS
(Elicit the names of all of the items -- furniture, pictures, radios, etc. -- in each room in the house that were acquired in the last week. Ask the following questions about each item.) a. Give a physical description of the item. b. Was the item in anyone else’s home before? Whose? c. Does it belong to anyone in the house? Who? d. Where did it come from? Was it bought at a store? Where? e. Who bought it? f. Was it a gift or a loan? g. Who loaned or gave it to you? h. Who will it be given to or loaned to? i. Is it home-made? Who made it? j. What else should we ask you about it?

3. FINANCES
Everyone has a hard time making it on the money they get and has to get some help from others. The aim is to try to figure out how people make it. This gets very complicated because some people live together, others eat together, and others share their income. a. Who is living in this house right now? (List relationships.) Who contributes to the finances of the household? How do they contribute (rent, utilities, etc.)? b. Who fetches the water? Who drinks or uses it? Who helps pay for it? b. Who ate in the household in the last week? Which meals? Who paid for the food and cooked? c. (Try to learn the source of income of everyone who contributes to the household.)

4. LEISURE TIME
I’d like to learn about how you spend your free time. a. With whom did you spend your day? b. With whom do you enjoy spending time each week? c. With whom do you participate in special activities (church groups, dancing, etc.)? d. Where and with whom do you eat breakfast, lunch, dinner? e. What housework do you do (shopping, scrubbing, cooking, dishes, etc.)? What other work do you do? With whom do you work?

Rating: Excellent, Very Good
Review:

Summary Statement

This proposal deals with conflicts over water shortages in Bolivia. The purpose of the research is to better understand how conflicts develop in water-scarce regions, and to outline the social and economic factors that mediate cooperation and conflict. The research will be conducted in Villa Israel, near Cochabamba, Bolivia. The objectives of the research are to document the incidence of water scarcity, to determine how water scarcity affects the frequency and quality of reciprocal exchanges between households, to determine how water scarcity affects social interactions between households, and to evaluate community norms for engaging in or withdrawing from reciprocal exchange relationships.

A number of hypotheses are outlined, perhaps too many to be accomplished in the scope of the research agenda. For example hypothesis 3 and hypothesis 4 are simply flip sides of the same coin. Moreover hypotheses 5 and 6 are reciprocal suppositions. Nevertheless, the research plan is clearly outlined, including the sampling frame and the methodology by which data will be collected. A major strength of the proposal is the clarity of the sampling pattern for in-depth interviews. The proposal also calls for use of an experimental game to study economic behaviors, analogous to research that has been conducted in fifteen small-scale societies. This game will test trust and reciprocity among participants. The intellectual merit and broader impacts of the research are clearly spelled out. The only other criticism would be a general failure of the investigators to situate the research questions within a larger political economic context. For example why are there water shortages to begin when? What is the role of the state in determining the availability of water? These and other macro-level questions may be of interest as the research is undertaken.

Rating: Very Good

Summary Statement

Working within the theoretical perspective that increase in scarcity of resources reduces cooperative ties within communities, the proposal aims to test the proposition that in Villa Isreal, a barrio of Cochabamba, Bolivia, severe water shortages erode reciprocal exchange and social relationships.

This is a very strong and well organized proposal. The Co-PI lists five clear research objectives that delineate aspects of the scarcity-erosion proposal, and in addition, 10 specific hypotheses are proposed, each stated clearly in regard to operationalization and measurement of variables. In order to generate data to test the hypotheses, a two-stage research plan is proposed. A purposive sample of 60households will be chosen, primarily for development of test protocols, mainly for the creation of a water scale. The measure will be designed as a Guttman scale. During phase two, in-depth interviews will be conducted with key informants, and four interviews will be conducted at each household. Data analysis will consist of coding the interviews and using inferential statistics to measure the relationships among social variables and water scarcity. ANOVA and repeated applications of ANOVA will be used for analysis of the data.

The only weakness of any consequence in the proposal is that virtually no attention is given as to how the coding will proceed. What does the Co-PI anticipate that the codes will be, i.e., what will be coded for? How will the codes relate to the methods? To the theoretical perspectives? If that had been clearer, the recommendation would be for a '5', but as it is, the recommendation is a '4', Very Good.

Rating: Excellent, Very Good
Review:

Summary Statement

The proposed project is an interesting and clearly formulated inquiry into the effects of water shortage in a periurban barrio of Cochabamba, Bolivia. The researcher proposes to measure whether cooperation among neighbors, especially certain forms of reciprocity, are altered by water scarcity. This researcher will test this problem through a series of hypotheses. The research objectives are clearly outlined and include documenting water scarcity in the community, determining the effects of water scarcity on reciprocal exchanges and social relations between households, and ascertaining whether a community norm exists for determining how people withdraw from reciprocal relations, and whether people follow these norms in practice. (Also, it might be important to determine whether the community follows any kind of water distribution system. Is it a kind of economic free-for-all or are ideas of turn taking employed at times?)

The project will be the first study to examine in what ways urban mutual support networks are affected by a scarce water supply. The topic is timely and important. The theoretical perspective for the research comes from economic/ecological anthropology. It is inspired by studies of reciprocity and conflict theory. Note, however, that there is a wide literature on Andean reciprocity that is only touched upon in the proposalùmuch of it, though based in rural 'traditional' communities might nonetheless be of use for understanding reciprocity among migrants to the city. The researcher has chosen five 'major kinds of ties' that are involved in mutual support networks, and these may in fact be borne out. But I hope the researcher will use participant observation to first test this. These five do not take into account other possible reciprocal ties that migrants might use. For instance, the category of 'neighbors,' especially in the absence of ayllu membership, may be important in this barrio, and would be worth examining. Also, classic Andean forms of reciprocity such as ayni (performed variously from place to place) may also be active in some guise in Cochabamba's barrios. Also forms of 'ayuda' bind people together, or is it certain social units that provide ayuda? The project proposed here would offer a wonderful perspective by additionally taking into consideration some of the rural forms of reciprocity, asking informants to list them and comment on them, and thus providing a comparative angle. The obvious counterpart in the countryside is water distribution for irrigation and there are numerous studies here (e.g., Gelles, Gose, Guillet, Isbell, Sherbondy, Sikkink) that discuss the conflict and cooperation involved in this event, and would serve as a counterpoint to the study proposed here. Also I hope the researcher will work towards a broader bibliography of studies from Bolivia and specifically Cochabamba (such as Albro, Dandler, Larson, Paulson) in which to contextualize the results of the study. (Obviously from my ratings I think this is a strong proposal; it's also a topic of interest to me which is why I offer the suggestions I do.)

The researcher has an excellent background and the necessary skills for undertaking this project. Her anthropological training is exemplary. She has not only been trained in anthropological methodology but has managed data collection and analysis for several projects. The analysis section of the current proposal evidences this. The researcher has also undertaken independent research projects in Mexico and Bolivia, and therefore has the fieldwork and language skills required for the project.

The methodology section is particularly strong. The proposal is based on a clear and reasonable research plan. The research will test a number of hypotheses using interviews of key informants, measurement of water availability, household interviews and observation, an experimental game, and participant observation. Throughout the process the researcher will build on current available data and work with NGOs active in this area. Data analysis will include constructing an ordinal measurement of water use, and analyzing interactions among households, as well as the results of the game. Quantitative data will be analyzed using inferential statistics: t-tests and ANOVA will facilitate this. The researcher addresses the issue of the project's social salience in a clear manner. The researcher plans to hire and train a Bolivian student in the methodology of the project and disseminate the results of the study to three local NGOs. These efforts are aimed at both contributing to the success of future water delivery projects, and to indicating 'possible avenues for conflict prevention in marginal urban communities.'