Building Resilience - How Research Has Been Used to Develop and Evaluate a Media and Communication Approach
Research Report // July 2017, 58 p.
Sonia Whitehead
There is growing evidence to suggest that media and communication can support people to become more resilient to short-term shocks and long-term trends. To date, however, systematic research on the role of media and communication projects in helping to build resilience is limited. This report advances this body of work in two ways.
First, it shows how research carried out across Asia, and in Bangladesh and Tanzania has been used to build an approach to producing media programming for resilience that is rooted in the needs of people.
Second, it shows the impact that media can have when adopting this approach.
Specifically, the report shows how using research to understand different people’s needs, as well as the barriers and motivators they face personally and in their wider, socio-political context, is important when designing media and communication projects that facilitate change.
Research across multiple countries shows that the main determinants of whether or not people take steps to become more resilient include:
• The impacts they are currently feeling or the anticipated risk of those impacts
• The extent to which they feel informed about how to take action
• How connected they feel to others in their community
• How confident they feel to act on their own
• How much they believe resources or institutional factors are a barrier to uptake