As I reflected in my last blog post, I’ve been wondering about how the capabilities approach might work as a lens for understanding technology and political participation in the UK, in particular when it comes to young women and the technology they love the most: the mobile phone.

Up until today I’d been looking at work from the ICT4D field so I was delighted to find a research programme at LSE on Equality, Capability and Human rights in the UK and Europe.

As I’m looking for a means to operationalise concepts to provide a framework for my research design it was great to read that one of the goals of the programme is to “ develop and implement a measurement framework based on the capability approach”. To this end, they worked with the Equality and Human Rights Commission to help them develop The Equality Measurement Framework “ a measurement framework that can be used to assess equality and human rights across a range of domains relevant to 21st century life.” covering 10 domains of freedom and opportunity:

I was particularly interested in chapter 13 which looks at ‘participation, influence and voice’ which has the following sub-domains of capability:

A. participate in decision-making and make decisions affecting your own life independently

B. participate in the formulation of government policy, locally and nationally

C. participate in non-governmental organisations concerned with public and political life

D. participate in democratic free and fair elections

E. get together with others, peacefully

F. participate in the local community

G. form and join civil organisations and solidarity groups, including trade unions

This an interesting list: frameworks like this are what I’m looking for to help structure my research.

There’s also some really valuable information in there about where key data on political participation can be found. For example, the British Election study tells us that only 44% of 18-24 year olds voted in the 2005 General Election (compared to 76% of those aged 45-64). The Citizenship Survey tells us that 29% of 18-24 year olds took part in political activity in the last 12 months (compared to 44% of those aged 45-64).

But I’m wondering where the technology is in these frameworks. If our political lives are now mediated by technology, how are we defining and measuring that? And what are we doing with our mobile phones that might fit into these frameworks?

There’s broader questions here as well – how are young, unemployed people (especially young women) having ‘voice and influence’ in British society and are existing national surveys collecting this data?