Qatar Foundation Annual Research Conference Proceedings Volume 2016 Issue 1

I am submitting this abstract to report on some of the research from the study titled “Qatari Women: Engagement and Empowerment” (UREP 15-035-5-013), a grant funded by the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF), which was aimed at looking at women's empowerment and engagement in Qatar. The research focuses on the majlis setting, which has been understudied, and the function and impact of the gatherings in relation to women's empowerment. The study looks at female empowerment through social, economic, cultural, political and educational lenses. The aim is to determine what facilitates and hinders women's empowerment in Qatar. My role in the research was as a student researcher. I contributed with the ethnographic research, writing the survey questionnaire, and producing a documentary that will be shown in Ajyal Film Festival 2015. We conducted two surveys for the purposes of this study; the latter survey, which collected responses from a nationally representative sample of male and female Qataris in December 2014 and January 2015, is the focus of my research. (Additional details on the methodology can be found at the end of this abstract.) My research focuses on the relationship between majlis participation and the sense of political efficacy and free speech. I argue that Qatari majlis participants are more likely to feel a higher level of influence over the state regarding issues that concern them and a higher level of freedom of speech, and I explain this result by linking majlis participation to the larger body of research on the impact of civil society. Citizens that engage in civil society are more likely to express their ideas, trust, accept and collaborate with one another (Krause, 2008). This participation essentially aids the feeling of empowerment, influence, and free speech. Majaalis are a space of civil society in which 80% of Qataris are engaged. In this civil society setting “individuals attempt to empower themselves through identifying notions that will lead to their personal and societal development, happiness and satisfaction” (Krause, 2008, 9). Social and personal development occurs in the majlis through skill building activities. Our survey results show that 83% shared their opinion with the group, 73% helped the group make a decision, 70% gathered or shared information on a topic important to them, 64% received encouragement or encouraged someone to take action on something important, 63% of participants have given a speech or presentation, 40% planned a meeting, and 25% contacted a person or institution to voice a concern. Some of the majlis activities mentioned above fall exactly into Brady, Verba and Schlozman's (1995) guidelines of what constitutes engaging in civic skills. I hypothesize that these activities within the majlis then aid in personal empowerment in the public sphere, such as feelings of political efficacy or freedom of speech. This specific hypothesis is important because the majlis space itself has been overlooked as a space of civil society due to its semi-public, semi-private nature. There is reason to believe that there are civil society activities occurring within the majlis; therefore it is important to examine the effects of the space that the majority of Qatari citizens participate in and its relationship to their feeling of influence and free speech. The survey results show that different types of majaalis are correlated with an individual's feelings of influence and free speech differently, and I look into this result with further research and interviews to help clarify this relationship. Also, my additional research helps me determine causality, in other words, whether the majlis actually causes empowerment among people. To conclude, the survey results show, with statistical significance, that majlis members, as opposed to non-majlis members, feel more influence over the state and more freedom of speech concerning issues important to them. I am currently conducting additional research on scholarly work related to civil society and empowerment, along with interviews with regular majlis participants, which will help me determine whether the relationship between majlis participants and the sense of influence and freedom of speech is a matter of correlation or causation. My presentation will discuss both survey results and results from my additional research. A note on the methodology of the survey: The Social And Economic Survey Research Institute (SESRI) at Qatar University, an established surveying institution, carried out the phone survey from December 25th 2014 until January 15th 2015. Respondents were chosen via random sampling through computer automated random mobile numbers provided to SESRI by a major telecommunications company in Qatar. A computer was used to automatically dial the mobile numbers of respondents with no chance of interviewer dial error. Respondents that didn't respond the first time were called multiple times throughout different times of the day over the survey period. All respondents were Qatari and above 18 years old, and a total of 302 females and 347 males were surveyed. The response rate is 34.4%, which is relatively high, compared to response rates of phone surveys in the U.S. (Pew Research Center). Interviewers asked the questions in Arabic and recorded the results through entering a number that was coded to a specific answer in the computer making the process quicker and more accurate in order to decrease the likeliness of interviewer error. The study sponsor, QNRF, did not play any role in editing, or censoring any of the survey questions or results. The survey results are within a +/ − 4% sampling error, meaning that the results are within an 8% range of representing the population as a whole. In my work, I report the survey results are reported with a 95% confidence level, meaning that I am 95% sure my results reflect the population as a whole within the range of sampling error.

References

Brady, Henry E., Sidney Verba, and Kay Lehman Schlozman. 1995. “Beyond SES: A Resource Model of Political Participation.” The American Political Science Review 89 (2): 271–94.

Krause, Wanda. 2008. “Women in Civil Society: Key Issues in the Middle East.” In Women in Civil Society: The State, Islamism, and Networks in the UAE, 1–26. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Pew Research Center. “Assessing the Representativeness of Public Opinion Surveys.” May 15, 2012. Accessed November 3, 2015.

Qatari Women Engagement and Empowerment: Qatar National Research Fund, UREP 15-035-5-013. March 29, 2014 – September 29, 2015.

After winning the bid for the FIFA World Cup 2022, Qatar albeit a small country in both size and population, has spurred significant international interest not just in the professional media but also on social media. Many international press agencies have closely monitored Qatar, typically reporting many points of contention. In the media in countries like the US and the UK, the discussion, which tends to focus on the preparation for the 2022 World Cup, is generally led by a few major players including the Guardian, and the Washington Post. Most of the recent coverage related to Qatar in public news channels and media portrays Qatar in a negative light, especially focusing on issues regarding migrant workers and allegations regarding improprieties in the FIFA bid. This recent trend in “Qatar bashing” in the media is damaging to the image of Qatar internationally. However, looking beyond professional news coverage, these topics appear to have also entered public discussions through social media such as Twitter. Topics such as migrant workers' deaths, and recent controversies in the World Cup bid are being discussed by the general public around the world in such social media platforms.

However, the extent to which these and other topics about Qatar are discussed is unknown. Is the conversation on Twitter dominated by a few sources such as in the traditional media? Or is there more diversity between residents of different countries on social media? To help answer this question we used Twitter to analyze public opinion about Qatar. Twitter has been used on many occasions to garner insight into public opinion. Predictions of the winner in the recent UK elections and the 2012 US primaries provide two such examples. Twitter has the advantage of being a medium for many people to freely voice their opinion on very serious, political and/or controversial issues that matter to them. This may make Twitter a relatively better social media platform to analyze the public sentiment in comparison to Facebook or Instagram, which tend to have more multifaceted and personal content.

To evaluate the content of the discussion about Qatar across the world, we collected tweets along with their user-data in 35 widely spoken languages retrieved via the Twitter Streaming API to examine the topical content of tweets about Qatar. We collected a corpus of 1.1 million raw tweets across 2 months (May to July 2015) and parsed them. Because of our interest in similarities and differences in tweets in difference locales, we then filtered them to discard tweets without user-defined locations. The remaining 0.45 million tweets were then linked to user-defined locations and clustered by country. These tweets were then broken down into uni-grams and bi-grams, based on user-count, to form tag clouds to visually compare and contrast the topics about Qatar between countries. Furthermore, in our study we also incorporated cited domain names pertaining to different URLs in the tweets, to provide insights about the key domains and figures that may have formed or influenced that perception.

In our analysis, we found that largely similar topics such as “migrant workers”, “deaths” and “FIFA” are discussed around the world regarding Qatar, which is a surprising given linguistic and cultural differences. However, we did see some national differences.

The key insight of the data analyzed is how different public sentiment in different countries stack up against each other regarding issues relating to Qatar. For example, the tag clouds indicate that in Nepal, the leading sentiment on the issue of migrant workers is relatively grim since its tag cloud features uni-grams like “funerals”. On the other hand, the tag cloud for France does not show much attention to the migrant workers. Interestingly, by extracting top 10 domains per each country, we found that same players, especially the Guardian, the Washington Post and the BBC are key sources of information even in non-English speaking countries such as Germany. That is, few professional media sources dominate the international conversation on Twitter. With this new methodology we have identified, for the first time to our knowledge, that a relatively small number of news sources drive the conversation about Qatar around the world. Though our study revolves around Qatar specifically, we believe this methodology can be used to track “nation branding” via social media, providing key insights to stake holders about how their nation is discussed across the world.

تتناول هذه الورقة البحثية موضوع “ تطور الأنماط التركيبية في اللغة العربية (دراسة إحصائية تحليلية حاسوبية)، إذ يهدف البحث إلى إنشاء مدونة لغوية تحصر (نسبيًا) الأنماط التركيبية في اللغة العربية، حصرًا تامًا على جهة الاستقرار والشمول، ذلك باعتماد عينات لغوية منتقاة من فترات تاريخية مختلفة (قديمًا وحديثًا)، وسيتم اعتماد الفترة ابتداءً من ق 200 قبل الهجرة إلى القرن الرابع عشر مقياسًا زمنيًا لأجناس النصوص الممتدة في هذه الحقبة الزمنية؛ وذلك بهدف تغطية الفترات الزمنية التي مرت بها اللغة العربية، ثم تأتي خطوة المقارنة والتحليل بدراسة مقارِنة للتحولات التي طرأت على طيف هذه الأنماط التركيبية خلال تلك الحقب الزمنية المختلفة. ويأتي الانتقال إلى إعداد المعالجة الإحصائية لهذه الأنماط، وذلك بإعدادها على نحو يكون صالحًا للمعالجة الآلية.الحاسوبية؛ بترميز كل نمط ترميزًا صوريًا مستقلًا

وانطلاقًا مما سبق؛ فإننا سنعتمد لتحقيق أهداف البحث منهجًا رئيسًا وهو المنهج التاريخي بالاستعانة بآليات المناهج الأخرى متعددة كآليات المنهج الإحصائي، والمنهج التحليلي. وهي مناهج تتناسب وطبيعة الأهداف التي يهدف إليها هذا المشروع. أما المنهج الوصفي فلتتبع الخصائص المميزة لكل فترة من الفترات الزمنية المختلفة المستهدفة في هذا البحث. ثم المنهج الإحصائي الذي هو استقراء الأنماط النحوية لكل فترة زمنية، وإحصائها.. أما المنهج التحليلي؛ فهو قراءة تحليلية في خصائص هذه الأنماط، ومستوى درجة ترددها، وإيقاع استعمالها في كل فترة من الفترات الزمنية المختلفة.. والغاية المرجوة من المزاوجة بين هذه المناهج، هي الوصول إلى خلاصات دقيقة؛ لتعطي صورةً مفصلة عن تطور الأنماط التركيية في اللغة العربية، وعن الإيقاع العام الذي تحكمه التحولات الأساسية التي شهدها هذا التطور خلال الفترات الزمنية المختلفة.