What Constitutes Good ICTD Research
Jenna Burrell, Kentaro Toyama · Information Technologies and International Development · 2009
The emerging aeld of research that examines the link between information and communication technology and socioeconomic development (ICTD) has been carried forward by researchers mapping methods from their home disciplines onto this new terrain. With this journal logging six years of history (Best & Bar, 2003) and with the third International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (Dias et al., 2009) behind us, we have arrived at a point where it is worth taking stock of the distinctive challenges we have encountered as a research community. This article intends to propose some common criteria for identifying high-quality and promising research in the aeld, a signiacant challenge in itself, given the diverse range of disciplines involved—from engineering to public policy, from the social sciences to development theory. The seeds of this article were planted in an exchange on a mailing list between its two authors over what standards were truly applicable across disciplinary and methodological distinctions (Toyama & Burrell, 2008). Despite our initial disagreements, we believe that an understanding of interdisciplinary commonalities and differences will inform how ICTD researchers conduct research, how authors write research papers, how they are reviewed, and how conferences and journals select those for publication. Some of these activities require collaboration or evaluation of work across disciplines, and an explicit recognition of their paradigmatic differences could help build bridges between disciplines by allowing disagreements to remain as such. Given the nature of the topic, some disclaimers are in order. First, we emphasize that the ideas put forth in this article will naturally reoect its authors’ particular educational backgrounds, research experiences, and personal perspectives. Burrell’s formal background is in computer science and sociology; Toyama’s in physics and computer science. Thus, our comments apply primarily to what we believe can be said about the disciplines of engineering (including computer science and the various engineering disciplines), the qualitative social sciences (including some, but not all, of anthropology, sociology, etc.), the quantitative social sciences (including some, but not all, of economics, public health, etc.), and aelds with mixed methodologies drawn from the above (including information science, communications research, etc.). Although we have made an attempt to think through what is important in other disciplines (e.g., social theory, public policy), we refrain from claiming to speak for them. With this in mind, we hope that readers will be persuaded by the arguments we present. As with any aeld of study, what work constitutes ICTD and how quality is judged remain open questions to be determined by the community as a whole. It’s a cause for celebration, on the one hand, that such a varied group of people should unite in the quest to understand how technology inter-