Title: Replication Data for: Can a Trusted Messenger Change Behavior when Information is Plentiful? Evidence from the First Months of the COVID-19 Pandemic in West Bengal

Type Dataset Banerjee, Abhijit, Alsan, Marcella, Breza, Emily, Chandrasekhar, Arun G., Chowdhury, Abhijit, Duflo, Esther, Goldsmith-Pinkham, Paul, Olken, Benjamin A. (2020): Replication Data for: Can a Trusted Messenger Change Behavior when Information is Plentiful? Evidence from the First Months of the COVID-19 Pandemic in West Bengal. Harvard Dataverse. Dataset. https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/AD79UA

Authors: Banerjee, Abhijit (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, J-PAL, NBER) ; Alsan, Marcella (Harvard Kennedy School, J-PAL, NBER) ; Breza, Emily (Harvard University, J-PAL, NBER) ; Chandrasekhar, Arun G. (Stanford University, J-PAL, NBER) ; Chowdhury, Abhijit (John C. Martin Centre for Liver Research and Innovations) ; Duflo, Esther (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, J-PAL, NBER) ; Goldsmith-Pinkham, Paul (Yale School of Management) ; Olken, Benjamin A. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, J-PAL, NBER) ; Banerjee, Abhijit (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, J-PAL, NBER) ;

Links

• Item record in Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab Dataverse
• Digital object URL

Summary

This package contains replication data for: “Can a Trusted Messenger Change Behavior when Information is Plentiful? Evidence from the First Months of the COVID-19 Pandemic in West Bengal”. All data files are in the data directory. These data have been deidentified and partially cleaned. Community member surveys were conducted between May 8, 2020 and May 19, 2020. Health worker surveys were conducted between April 21, 2020 and September 15, 2020. The code, produced in Stata and R, contains scripts for data analysis. For further details on the data or how to run the code, please see the README in the do_files directory. The abstract of the paper is as follows: Can information from a credible messenger shift behavior in an information-saturated environment? In a randomized controlled trial involving twenty-eight million individuals in West Bengal, we find that SMS-delivered video messages containing information about COVID-19 symptoms and health-preserving behaviors recorded by a credible messenger increased adherence to targeted and non-targeted preventive behaviors, measured by two objective measures (symptoms reported to a health worker, and phone usage at home), as well as self-reported behaviors. We find large spillovers onto non-targeted recipients. Credible light-touch messaging can play an important role in crisis response, even when similar information is widely available.

More information

• DOI: 10.7910/DVN/AD79UA

Subjects

• Social Sciences

Dates

• Publication date: 2020
• Submitted: June 26, 2020
• Updated: August 11, 2022

Rights

• info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess
• http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 CC0 1.0

Format

electronic resource