PRISMA Checklist Mutual Aid Project - BITS-Research/MutualAid GitHub Wiki

**INTRODUCTION **

Rationale (6) Describe the rationale for the review in the context of what is already known:

As 2020 progressed, mutual aid rapidly popularized as a frame and organizing structure for communities to organize and provide assistance independent from the State during the COVID-19 health and economic crisis, as well as the black lives matter protests. This mutual aid approach, grounded in anarchist theory but heavily practice-oriented – puts itself in opposition to the bureaucratic and hierarchical approaches to assistance, which it frames as ‘charity’. Instead, mutual aid emphasizes solidarity, equity, and autonomy. The affordances of sociotechnical arrangements incentivize formalization and structure in organizations, as has been noted in information studies research on cooperatives. Analyzing information behavior and technology use in mutual aid groups, which explicitly critique mainstream bureaucratic structures, provides a useful lens to study tensions in information system adoption and behavior.

Objectives (7) Provide an explicit statement of the question(s) the review will address with reference to participants, interventions, comparators, and outcomes (PICO)

RQs:

  • What are the general practices these organizations use to navigate anti-hierarchical and anti-bureaucratic ethos in their work?
  • When present, how does this link to the stated information and technology practices of these mutual aid organizations.

**METHODS ** Eligibility Criteria (8) Specify the study characteristics (such as PICO, study design, setting, time frame) and report characteristics (such as years considered, language, publication status) to be used as criteria for eligibility for the review. This section also includes Information Sources (9), Search Strategy (10), Selection Process (11b), and Data Collection Process (11c).

MUTUAL AID DEFINITION: Locally-organized groups focusing on material assistance or service provision. This excludes government arrangements, utility companies, voting drives and protest networks NOT also involved in material assistance. This also excludes self-help groups, Anonymous groups, and other support groups in the medical and social work literature that are often referred to in the literature as mutual aid groups but are not focused on material assistance or service provision.

In general, mutual aid is often linked to in international literature as retirement or insurance services – perhaps similar in spirit to the historic fraternal mutual aid societies of the late 19th and 20th century. Both of these are excluded from analysis. In addition, Chinese research often links to mutual aid practices -but these are typically more hierarchical and formal government processes, and hence to not meet the definition for inclusion.

Search Criteria:

  1. Search by ‘Topic’ (Title, Keyword, Abstracts): in ACM, WoS, IEEE, and SCOPUS for ‘mutual aid’ publications between 2000-2020.
  2. Read through title and abstracts. Exclude if they do not appear to meet working definition, OR if the publication is not an article or in English. This working definition is a little bit fuzzy at the 'food bank' level, but serves as a helpful heuristic. If a mutual aid organization or food bank includes uses mutual aid as an explicit guiding force – it should be included. If it seems to only be an incidental lip service in the abstract – exclude.
  3. After initial search, 1647 publications were reduced to 86 entries for provisional inclusion in the corpus – including 1 round of review with edge cases between Nic and Daniel. Another 26 publications were categorized as ‘conceptual’ – i.e. talking about mutual aid – but not linked to a specific case. These may be reviewed for informing analysis/discussion section.
  4. At this stage – 86 entries are now being read to be categorized and classified upon research questions. Several entries are expected to be considered out of scope upon more detailed review, so the final inclusion list is expected to be shorter.

STUDY RECORDS

**Data management (11a) **Describe the mechanism(s) that will be used to manage records and data throughout the review

GITHUB

Data items (12) List and define all variables for which data will be sought (such as PICO items, funding sources), any pre-planned data assumptions and simplifications

Articles

Outcomes and prioritization (13) List and define all outcomes for which data will be sought, including prioritization of main and additional outcomes, with rationale

Risk of bias in individual studies (14) Describe anticipated methods for assessing risk of bias of individual studies, including whether this will be done at the outcome or study level, or both; state how this information will be used in data synthesis

TBD

DATA SYNTHESIS

(15a) Describe criteria under which study data will be quantitatively synthesised

TBD

(15b) If data are appropriate for quantitative synthesis, describe planned summary measures, methods of handling data and methods of combining data from studies, including any planned exploration of consistency (such as I2 , Kendall’s τ)

NA

(15c) Describe any proposed additional analyses (such as sensitivity or subgroup analyses, meta-regression)

NA

(15d) If quantitative synthesis is not appropriate, describe the type of summary planned Meta-bias(es)

NA

(16) Specify any planned assessment of meta-bias(es) (such as publication bias across studies, NA