Executive Summary
This report presents the findings of a WhatsApp survey about the life worlds of Syrian refugees and host communities conducted in Qaraoun (West Bekaa) in November 2017. The survey is at the core of an Innovation Project ‘Speak your Mind to Prevent Conflict in Lebanon’, funded by the UNDP innovation facility. The rationale of the WhatsApp survey was two-fold. First, to test the feasibility of using WhatsApp as an interactive survey tool which enhances local engagement of the crisis response in Lebanon. Second, to enrich our understanding of local conflict dynamics and the impact of assistance by collecting narrative data from both host community members and refugees. This section provides a short overview of the report’s key findings.
WhatsApp – a Feasible Tool for Two Way Communication?
Overall, our respondents gave very positive feedback on the tool, appreciating it as an easily accessible way of communicating their needs and concerns to international organizations. Digital literacy is widespread among both host communities and refugees in Lebanon, making WhatsApp an underexploited tool for data collection. Indeed, the latest VASyR showed that 84% of refugee households use WhatsApp. 242 people participated in our survey out of 1434 numbers we contacted, which gives us a response rate of 17%. This is better than many online surveys where response rates are between 10 and 20%. Our survey was also more demanding as people were asked to send us voice and text messages to openended questions over a whole month.
The survey was more successful in reaching out to Syrian refugees than to host communities. 87% of our sample were Syrians and only 13% Lebanese. We also struggled to reach out to women who only make up 18% of our sample. That said, there was some overlap in respondents with men replying to the initial questions and female members of the household replying to later questions. All age groups were represented in the survey, with most respondents being between 30 and 40. The survey also managed to elicit the voices of more vulnerable demographics. Of those who indicated their employment situation in the survey, the majority were unemployed.
The narrative data we received is very rich, giving us a data volume comparable to conducting 242 qualitative interviews. Contemporary social stability analysis is often skewed towards quantitative data, yet rich narrative data can help to elucidate what exactly survey results mean and what the underlying factors of tensions between Lebanese and Syrians in Lebanon are.
Overall, we argue that once scaled up, the WhatsApp survey can make five important contributions to development and humanitarian programming in Lebanon and beyond:
First, it gives people more voice, particularly vulnerable groups who struggle with literacy and may not feel comfortable to reply via text message. By providing the option to send voice messages, the WhatsApp tool empowers people to express their needs, concerns and fears in their own words. As such, it can complement needs assessments as community input via WhatsApp can help to make project selection and design more inclusive and accountable.
Second, the survey tool boosts Monitoring & Evaluation analysis as bottom-up feedback supports a more rigorous evaluation of project impact and accessibility long after project completion. Such feedback can also shed light on some ‘hidden barriers’ to project accessibility for vulnerable populations, knowledge of which can help to refine project design in the future.
Third, the tool produces nuanced qualitative data that enriches our understanding of refugee lives and inter-community tensions in Lebanon. The informality of WhatsApp and the anonymization of data creates a safe space for people to articulate their views, including ideas and stories they would not narrate in public. As such, the survey gives us greater insight into public sentiments that may be simmering below the surface. At the same time, the survey also breaks the media’s monopoly on ‘what people really think’ by demonstrating that people’s discourses are much more diverse than the media narrative suggests.
Fourth, the WhatsApp survey can become a pertinent tool to collect real time data in crisis situations. A WhatsApp network of phone numbers can be set up in at-risk areas. With such a system in place, two-way communication between people on the ground and international response actors can be initiated rapidly. People could send us voice or text messages explaining the situation on the ground and their needs, while international organizations could inform them about safe zones and aid distribution locations.
Finally, such a WhatsApp tool is also a more cost-effective data collection tool than conventional household surveys.