Measuring knowledge sharing
Most research on knowledge sharing uses surveys that measure people’s self-reported information- sharing behavior and intentions to share. Fewer studies exist with empirical evidence on actual sharing behavior, and the empirical studies that do exist tend to focus on knowledge sharing through online communities for commercial profit rather than for health and development professionals.
Click here to download Table: Overview of the Knowledge SUCCESS Information-Sharing Assessments (37 KB .pdf)
To fill this gap and better understand how information sharing can be improved in the FP/RH community, Knowledge SUCCESS conducted an online assessment to capture and measure actual information sharing behavior and intention to share failures among a sample of FP/RH and other global health professionals based in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia (see Table, attached). We recently finished collecting data for the assessment and are currently finalizing the analysis of our findings. The main goal of the assessment was to investigate the most effective behavioral nudges to encourage information sharing (generally) and sharing of failures (more specifically).
Social norms are the spoken or unspoken rules that create behavioral expectations for members of a group of people. Actively providing people with clear information on what other people are doing can nudge them to do the same behavior.
Image credit: DTA Innovation flashcards, used under a Creative Commons license.
We tested the following behavioral nudges:
- Social norms: We investigated if individuals are more likely to share information when they know that their peers are sharing information, too. We also tested the impact of social norms on people’s willingness to share their professional failures.
- Recognition: We investigated if individuals are more likely to share information if they are told that the recipient would know who shared it. In other words, will individuals share more information if they receive personal recognition?
- Incentives: We investigated the effect of offering an incentive (a chance to enter a raffle for free registration for the International Conference on Family Planning) on people’s willingness to share professional failures.
In addition to these behavioral nudges, we explored the positive and negative associations with a body of terms that describe “failures” to identify the best way to convey the meaning while avoiding strong negative connotations.
Finally, the assessment also explored whether and how information sharing behavior differs by gender. For example, previous research suggested that people have a tendency to interact with other people of the same gender. Therefore, we investigated whether information sharing behavior differed when individuals were asked to share with someone of the same gender compared with someone of a different gender. In addition, studies have shown that women experience more hostility than men when presenting at conferences, which may discourage them from sharing publicly at a live session or gathering. In our failure-sharing assessment, we explored gender differences in participants’ intention to share failures when they were told that there would be a live Q&A session after the failure-sharing event.