This proposal was made to the National Science Foundation Dissertation Development Grant Competition in 2002. This proposal seeks to learn about people’s reactions to levels of water scarcity in a community in Bolivia called Villa Israel. This proposal outlines five main research objectives: the first being to document the influence on this society in general which would involve the development and testing of a scale to measure water consumption, as well as conducting interviews to document the difference of water use in households. The second was to find out how a lack of water influences interactions in the same sample of homes over a nine-month period. The third research goal was to determine the amount of social exchanges between house holds, and if there is some kind of community norm for dealing with someone withdrawing from more frequent interactions. And the last goal was to determine if the withdrawals of the households from exchanges and social relationships because of the norms (if they are present).

The data types that would be used in this research are: cultural knowledge, behavior or reports of behavior,  and hidden social patterns, as well as some observational type data to measure the water levels. The data collection methods that would have been used to find the necessary data are sampling and choosing key informants so that the researcher can be sure that the sample households are being honest and not putting up a front that would prevent the study from getting necessary data. The researcher would conduct a measurement of water availability for each of the selected households being used in the study and for the community in general. In order to gain the opinion and knowledge based information she (the researcher) would conduct household interviews with each of the families. And the last data collection method proposed was an experimental game where,

“The game is an anonymous, one-time interaction between two people that uses real money. The player A is given a sum equal to one day’s labor, and the option to keep the money or send some of it to the player B. If the money is sent to player B, it triples and player B determines how much of the money should be returned to player A. The amount of money offered by player A indicates how much A trusts B, and the amount B returns to A is a measure of reciprocation”  (7, Wutich).

The analysis of this data would determine when and how social ties are effected when a vital recourse becomes scarce and how the people in the society have learned to cope with the challenges brought up. Three analysis methods used to compile and sort the data were : Data entry and coding, Inferential statistics and analysis of ethnographic data.

Wutich, Amber. “The Effects of Water Scarcity on Reciprocity and Sociability in Bolivia.”