Autonomous Motivation and Prosocial Behavior: a Natural Field Experiment

The intervention will happen in two stages. In the first stage we will collect information from schools about the academic performance of students, age, gender, and a few questions about the social causes that they will be asked to raise awareness. These questions include their perceived awareness about each cause, perceived level of difficulty in raising awareness about each cause, perceived ability to raise awareness about each cause, previous volunteering experience, and 5 multiple-answer quiz questions for each of the cause. Students will be asked to choose the alternatives that they consider correct. The quiz helps to understand their overall knowledge about each cause/topic.

In the second stage, students will be asked to write awareness-raising messages against three social causes: depression, bullying and social exclusion of people with disabilities. Participants will be asked to provide their input in four different conditions, which are described in the experimental design. I partnered with the Observatory for the Rights of Children and Youth in Albania, and the intervention will happen at the same time that the NGO will promote in high-schools the U-Report social messaging platform, which is managed by UNICEF. That is, not only will students register and receive more information about the platform, but they will voluntarily provide input for it, by writing awareness-raising messages.

Both stages will be implemented in the classrooms of the four high-schools that will be part of this project. The Ministry of Education, Sports and Youth has already approved the promotion of U-Report in high-schools as well as the implementation of this research project. The Information and Data Protection Commissioner of Albania has also provided an approval to the Ministry concerning the data that will be collected, and the protection of students' anonymity (de-identification). Most importantly, CERGE-EI has issued the ethical approval for this project.

2023-04-07

2023-04-14

O1. Total number of relevant awareness-raising messages.
)2. The share of messages that have high potential to be published on U-report
O.3 Overall quality of the relevant messages

O1: while students will have the freedom to write anything they believe it is valuable or not, what counts for this project is the total number of sentences that are related to the task. For example, a student who is asked to write awareness-raising messages against bulling, may write 10 sentences but only half are related to preventing bullying. Hence, his outcome will be 5 instead of 10.
O2. If the evaluators of these messages choose only 5 messages out of 10 that have a potential to be published, the outcome is 50%.
O3. The evaluators rate the quality of the written message on a 1-10 scale, where 1 means lowest quality, and 10 means highest quality.

SO1. Willingness to volunteer in the future (Yes/No and e-mail provision)
SO2. Overall level of task enjoyment
SO3. Total number of awareness messages about another cause (urban pollution)

SO1. (Yes/No and willingness to provide their e-mail for notifications in the future
SO2. Measured on a 0-10 scale, where 0 means "totally disliked the task", and 10 means "fully enjoyed the task"
SO3. Measured by the number of messages they write to prevent urban pollution.

Control group: students will be asked to volunteer by writing awareness-raising messages against one randomly chosen cause: depression, bullying or social exclusion of people with disabilities.

Choice treatment: students will be asked to volunteer by writing awareness-raising messages against the cause of their choice, including depression, bullying, and social exclusion of people with disabilities.

Ability matching treatment: students will be asked to volunteer by writing awareness-raising messages against the cause they feel more able to raise awareness. They will be asked to reveal their abilities for each cause prior to the intervention through the stage one survey. Specifically, they will be asked to indicate how able from a scale from 1-10 they feel about raising awareness for each of the following causes: depression, bullying, and social acceptance of people with disabilities.

Monetary reward: students will be asked to volunteer by writing awareness-raising messages against one randomly chosen cause: depression, bullying or social exclusion of people with disabilities. They will be told that the student in the class with more awareness-raising messages selected by the NGO to be posted in the U-Report social messaging platform, will receive a symbolic award of 20 Euros.

Not available

Randomization will be done in office by a computer. The chosen randomization method is described by Alvaro Carril and it can be implemented in Stata using the randtreat command which randomly assign clusters to uneven treatment groups and deal with misfits. This method also allows for stratification based on school.

The randomization will be performed at the class level.

Yes

148 classes

4500-5000 - it will depend on whether all students will be present in the class on both implementation days.

The final treatment split is: 39 classes control, 43 classes choice treatment, 41 classes ability-matching treatment, 25 classes monetary reward. Note that the number of clusters in the monetary reward depended on funding.