Proposed SNA: Communication Flows and Information Sharing within a Refugee Aid Organization - The Case of the American Refugee Committee

I will not be joining the second module.

Background:

The American Refugee Committee (ARC) works to provide aid in refugee contexts in 7 countries. Its programs include health care, clean water provision, shelter repair, legal aid, trauma counseling, microcredit, community development services, and repatriation assistance. in 2011 the organization served more than 2.5 million people. In 2009 in response to employee feedback that they felt unsupported to do their jobs effectively and the request for more opportunities to interact with coordinators in other countries working in the same problem areas, the organization implemented an intranet system and hired several topic-specific experts with the intention of building connections among staff in different countries, support the sharing of best practices, and to allow for project replication. It is unclear whether this has been effective. 

Questions and Methodology:

The most important question to answer is: How are employees connected across country projects? This can help the ARC understand how its intranet and area experts have changed (or not changed) the nature of information-sharing within the organization. A survey will be administered by HR that asks employees to identify who they have interacted with in the last six months and to identify how that interaction has taken place (meeting at HQ or conference, phone conferences, email, intranet, etc.). Attribute data will be collected on the country location of each person, their issue area of work, their position level within the organization, and the amount of time they have been with the ARC. 

Hypothesis:

I expect the analysis to show that people are much more connected within their country areas and have extremely limited ties with individuals outside of their base. Field Coordinators and Country Directors will likely be very significant bottlenecks, well connected themselves, but not creating connections between their contacts. 

Potential Complications/Limitations:

Response rate is always a consideration, and will be important in this case. It may also be logistically difficult to include non-expat staff because of language barriers and, in the case of refugee staff, access dependent on their individual supervisor. 

Another consideration is that, while ARC employees may not be will connected outside of their location, they are probably very well connected to other people who work with different organizations on their same issue area. This analysis will fail to capture those relationships and the information-sharing that takes place that way. To undertake a survey of an entire area’s aid organizations would be politically very difficult, as few aid organizations like to share information outside of their organization, and would create even more issues with response rates.