Recipients of PSC Small Grant Awards

The purpose of this project was to improve understanding of how individuals in the general population experience and perceive armed conflict and how they make decisions when exposed to violence. This grant was used to collect a series of 25 semi-structured interviews in the Chitwan Valley of Nepal that addressed experiences during the recent armed conflict, how individuals and families made decisions to leave or to stay in the face of widespread violence, what factors they considered in their decisions, and how they assessed the danger that they faced. Respondents were selected to include individuals who migrated during the conflict and those who did not. The interviews became a key part of my dissertation work, which primarily involved quantitative analysis of survey data in this area. They added depth to my dissertation and allowed me to better analyze migration behavior and how different individual life situations affected decision-making and the ability to migrate. Information from these interviews has also been useful in other papers I have written that address other demographic behaviors in response to the conflict, such as marriage and childbearing, measurement of exposure to violence, and variations in the development of fear during periods of conflict.