Transforming Everything?: Evaluating Broadband's Impacts Across Policy Areas

Broadband is essential infrastructure for connecting remote communities, streamlining healthcare services, and supporting innovation. This book provides a comprehensive guide to evaluating broadband initiatives across diverse contexts and proposes guidance and methods for policymakers and researchers. It addresses key measurement and evaluation challenges, including privacy and security, and inadequate research methods for target populations.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 04 April 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc

Broadband, also known as high-speed internet, has been hailed as one of the most significant infrastructure challenges of the 20th century. Its potential to connect remote communities, streamline healthcare services, and foster innovation across various sectors, including education, economics, and more, is immense. With substantial investments pouring into broadband infrastructure, it becomes crucial for citizens and policymakers to assess whether the promise of broadband is being realized.

In response, Transforming Everything? provides a comprehensive guide to the complexities and possibilities of broadband as a social technology. It addresses the challenges of evaluating broadband initiatives across diverse contexts and offers guidance and methods for evaluation for policymakers and researchers. Contributors, drawn from pioneering research in program evaluation and information technology, explore broadband applications in health, education, and civic engagement. They also address key measurement and evaluation challenges in the field, including issues related to privacy and security and inadequate research methods for target populations.

Collectively, the chapters in this volume raise important questions for improving research and evaluation in broadband use and producing actionable evidence in a rapidly evolving environment. Transforming Everything? equips readers with a critical understanding of broadband technology and the necessary evidence to assess whether broadband programs and policies are truly empowering the communities they serve.

Weight: 384g
Dimension: 234 x 155 x 15 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780190082888