Muslim Adolescents and Authority: Behavioral Experiments in Pakistan

Every fifth person in South Asia is an adolescent. Adolescents face exciting, yet also challenging changes. The challenges are rooted in the adolescents' exclusion from basic decision-making, strong and often harmful social norms, and limited access to information on issues that influence their socio-economic wellbeing, development and lives. To address these challenges, UNICEF and the IKEA Foundation conduct an impact evaluation for a multi-sectorial adolescents programme. The baseline assessment was conducted in 761 villages in rural and urban areas of Punjab and Sindh in Pakistan prior to the roll-out of the program. It revealed exceptional levels of vulnerability of the group of interest. The baseline results indicate the prevalence of very strong social norms and low levels of adolescents' self-determination. In July 2016 we conduct a series of well-tested behavioral experiments to assess adolescents' social norms such as the anticipation of rejection/condemnation from others, the likelihood to obey and beliefs about their counterparts' action. Furthermore, we want to observe whether adolescents will initiate a renegotiation of conditions offered to them. We will vary the setting by randomly allocating whether the adolescents are playing against other adolescents or against adults. Moreover, we will randomize the appearance of religious leaders during the sessions (in 16 villages), whereby in 8 villages the imam will be asked to additionally read a prayer prior to the sessions. In total, the behavioral experiments will be conducted in 24 villages, with 8 adults and 16 adolescents. The activities will partly be conducted with the same individuals (adolescents, parents, imams) who responded to the baseline survey. This will allow linking the datasets to understand the relationship between individual characteristics (such as socio-economic status), attitudes and norms. In the coming years, 12 of these villages will receive the UNICEF program, 12 others not.