Communal Innovations: Inspiring Neighborhoods of Hope and Advocacy

Abstract

Innovations promise a better future, which may generate feelings of hope and inspire advocacy. Some innovations are more communal in nature: attempting to address a social problem, through community engagement and wide-spread adoption. For such innovations, the social processes that involve collective aspects of community life may play important roles in fostering hope and interpersonal advocacy. This study uses communication infrastructure theory and discrete emotions theory to investigate hope and advocacy within a field trial for a salient, visible, community-bound innovation to reduce transmission of malaria. Heads of households in one community (N = 119) in West Africa were interviewed. Results showed that innovation hope was predicted by appraisals of innovation attributes. Better appraisals of the innovation’s attributes, greater perceived collective efficacy, and recent malaria illness predicted more innovation advocacy. The spatial analysis showed that innovation advocacy was geographically clustered within the community, but hope was not. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Notes

¹ The model is y = ρWy + Xβ + ε, where y is a vector of observations on the dependent variable (i.e., innovation hope), Wy is a spatially lagged dependent variable for the weights matrix W, X is a matrix of observations on the explanatory variables, ε is a vector of i.i.d. error terms, and ρ and β are parameters (Anselin et al., 2006).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant to the Pennsylvania State University from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation [Grant # OPP1131603].