Women's Empowerment through Community Radio

Last registered on March 13, 2025
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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Women's Empowerment through Community Radio
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0014417
Initial registration date
March 07, 2025

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
March 13, 2025, 8:17 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Country
India
Region
Haryana

Primary Investigator

Name
Pushkar Maitra
Affiliation
Monash University
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Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name
Tom Lane
PI Affiliation
Newcastle University Business School
Contact Investigator
PI Name
Rajesh Ramachandran
PI Affiliation
Monash University
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PI Name
Smriti Sharma
PI Affiliation
Newcastle University Business School
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Additional Trial Information

Status
In development
Start date
2025-03-15
End date
2025-07-31
Keywords
Behavior, Gender, Lab
Additional Keywords
Community Radio, Intra-household bargaining
JEL code(s)
D13, D90, C93, O12
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
Achieving gender equality and the empowerment of girls and women is a key objective of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Gender inequality in India is widespread, with challenges including low female labour force participation, significant unpaid domestic work, restrictions on mobility and high levels of domestic violence. Despite numerous policies aimed at tackling this challenge, significant obstacles remain (Duflo, 2012; Jayachandran, 2015; World Bank, 2012). This study investigates the impact of one specific policy instrument: media – particularly community radio – on women’s empowerment and well-being, with a focus on India.

This study, using incentivized experiments embedded in surveys, aims to provide important insights on policy tools available to improve the welfare and empowerment of women in India. It will also contribute to the academic literature on the influence of media on attitudes and behaviours, specifically regarding women’s outcomes (e.g., DellaVigna and La Ferrara, 2015; Jensen and Oster, 2007; La Ferrara et al., 2012).
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Lane, Tom et al. 2025. "Women's Empowerment through Community Radio." AEA RCT Registry. March 13. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.14417-1.0
Sponsors & Partners
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
We are not introducing our own intervention, but are exploring the effects of the "natural experiment" of exposure to community radio station (CRS) broadcasting. This will be done by comparing our experimental outcomes between villages with exposure to CRS coverage and those without.
Intervention Start Date
2025-03-17
Intervention End Date
2025-05-15

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
The difference between treated and control villages in each of the following:

1. Bargaining power of wife in joint decision;
2. Bargaining power of wife (inferred from allocation task);
3. Social norms regarding female empowerment
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
1. Bargaining power of wife in joint decision is constructed from Tasks 1 and 4 in the experiment (details of the Tasks are presented in the Experimental Design, below). Denote the wife and husband's individual risk preferences as A and B respectively, and the joint risk preference in Task 4 as C. In cases where C lies in between A and B, the wife's bargaining power is calculated as (C-B)/(A-B). In cases where C lies outside A and B, the wife's bargaining power = 0 if C is closer to B, and = 1 if C is closer to A. If A and B are the same, the wife's bargaining power is undefined and the observation is dropped.

2. Bargaining power of wife (inferred from allocation task, Task 2, see below) is measured as 1 - WTP, where WTP is the wife's willingness to pay to control the household budget. WTP is measured as (350 - X)/350, where X is the amount of rupees for self which makes the wife indifferent with her husband receiving 350 rupees, as measured in Task 2.

3. Social norms regarding female empowerment are measured by the aggregate responses to each question in Task 3. The possible responses are "very appropriate", "somewhat appropriate", "somewhat inappropriate", "very inappropriate". We will observe the raw distributions of responses for each of the 24 outcomes (own opinion, guess of men's most common response, guess of women's most common response, for each of the 8 questions). Following the standard approach in the literature, we will also convert the responses into numerical values of 1, 1/3, -1/3 and -1 respectively and estimate the mean response for each outcome.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
We will conduct incentivized experiments embedded in surveys. Participants will be married couples in 20 villages, 10 of which have CRS coverage and 10 of which don't. The experiment will consist of 4 tasks which each couple will undertake. At the end of the experiment, one task is randomly selected for payment for each couple.

Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
We do not randomly assign subjects to treatment. Our "treatments" are the natural assignment of villages to CRS coverage or not.

However, randomisation is involved in the selection of couples to be sampled. Our lab-in-the field intervention will be conducted in the Sirsa district of Haryana. We selected the state of Haryana due to its significant gender disparities, including one of the lowest sex ratios in India. Using the Indian government’s compendium of community radio stations, we geocoded all stations in Haryana and matched them to village boundaries from the SHRUG database and village-level census data from 2011.

We classified villages based on their proximity to a community radio station (CRS):

Treatment-eligible villages: 2–25 km from a CRS
Control-eligible villages: 25–50 km from a CRS

We first identified 75 villages that met these criteria. From this list, we randomly sampled 45 villages, which were then visited by enumerators to confirm CRS signal availability. We first applied propensity score matching techniques to generate village weights based on literacy rates and the share of the population belonging to Scheduled Castes. Using these weighted probabilities, we then conducted a random selection of:

5 treatment and 5 control villages for JG radio
5 treatment and 5 control villages for RR radio

This final selection resulted in 10 treatment and 10 control villages for the experiment.
Randomization Unit
See details in Randomization Method.
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
20 villages


Sample size: planned number of observations
250 married co-habiting couples (i.e., 500 individuals). This sample size was dictated by the available project budget.
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
125 couples in 10 CRS-exposed villages, 125 couples in 10 control villages with no CRS exposure.
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Supporting Documents and Materials
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee
IRB Approval Date
2024-11-27
IRB Approval Number
45723
IRB Name
Newcastle University
IRB Approval Date
2025-03-05
IRB Approval Number
50850
Analysis Plan