Key ingredients for effective community research

Key ingredients for effective community research

Key ingredients for effective community research

Steve Fisher

We have had a positive experience recently in working with two community groups to design and conduct research on topics they consider important. Both research projects were managed by Ninti One and we contributed to the work as their partner. I came away from each project thinking that the reasons why the projects went well deserved to be thought through and written down, which is the purpose of this article.

By community-based research, I am referring to any process that works with local people to conduct research. There are examples featured on the projects and publications pages of this website. In one of the projects that inspired this article, the objective of the group was to learn what the rest of the community thought about a cultural education program their organisation had been running and also an initiative to improve local employment opportunities. The community is located in the Northern Territory. In a second project, we trained a group of young people to conduct research on priorities for youth in a town in Western Australia. The aim was for them to make the case through research for government investments in certain services and facilities to meet the needs of young people. 

For both projects, we worked through a standard research process which had the following steps:

  1. Objectives – Working out the purpose of the research and what it was intended to achieve
  2. Design – Identifying the information we needed to collect, choosing the research method (such as surveys or focus groups) and working out the sample (who and how many people we will talk to)
  3. Data collection – Usually through small research teams.
  4. Data analysis – Working out what the information we have collected is telling us.
  5. Presentation – Preparing diagrams and charts that interpret and present the findings of the research.

In both places, the results achieved and the feedback from the communities were very positive. So, what were the key ingredients that led to effective community research in these example? The illustration below is a summary.

I will explain these four points. Some people might work best as lone researchers, but community-based research really calls for a team approach. We have usually worked with a minimum of six local people and up to around twenty. People feel more confident when doing something new as part of a team. It can be fun, especially when people share their sense of humour.  

When starting the work, we have noticed that allowing up to a day for sitting down with people in a comfortable place and doing some preparation works really well.  Some slides may be useful to show, especially where examples of research from other communities can be show and explained. But flipchart paper, whiteboards and marker pens are equally important. Writing down the five steps above, explaining how they work and then asking people for their suggestions makes for a process of participatory preparation that often brings the best out of the team given that they know the community well. For example, it may be important to ask:

  • What exactly do we want to achieve from the research?
  • How can we explain what the research is about, to people who are willing to participate?
  • Who should we talk to?
  • What methods should we use?
  • What is the best way to ask questions? What words and phrases will people find easiest to understand?
  • How should we record the responses of people?

It might seem obvious to include this point, but so many people in communities are invited to meetings for which the purpose is not clear to them. We need to make sure this problem is avoided when planning community-based research. Otherwise, the level of energy and interest of the team might understandably decline. It is worth writing a clear purpose on paper to stick on the wall and then referring regularly to it as the one everyone agreed in the first bullet point above.

The final key ingredient in effective community-based research is the methods. We commonly use and recommend surveys as being the most manageable method for local people new to research. Surveys can be administered fairly quickly across a couple of days, especially if there are small teams made up of two or three people moving around the community to talk to people. The results build over time and people can start to analyse and interpret the data as more information is collected.

Other methods are valuable too, including semi-structured interviews, focus groups and case studies. These methods take more practice and skill to manage but are important to a mixed methods approach that brings together qualitative and quantitative data.

‘We are not researchers’ – Making M&E accessible

‘We are not researchers’ – Making M&E accessible

‘We are not researchers’

Making M&E accessible

Steve Fisher

The increasing need for evidence of the impact of investments in social development, health and education programs places pressures on organisations and their staff. This is not unreasonable, but for many people, monitoring and evaluation remains an obscure subject, distant from the day-to-day activities of working with clients.

Community Works often runs introductory training workshops on monitoring and evaluation for health workers, NGO board members or groups of development professionals seeking to strengthen their work in this area. Sometimes participants make clear their difficulty with the subject. ‘We are not researchers’ they say. ‘Çollecting and analysing data is not something we have done before’. Or, they sometimes imply, is that the reason we became health or community workers in the first place.

We have learned from these experiences. As a result, we try to develop materials and deliver training sessions that follow four key principles:

Modify language

The phrase ‘impact assessment’ often throws people off course straight away. We have found that ‘measuring change’ is a good way to talk about monitoring and evaluation because it leads to a conversation about what are the specific changes a project or program intends to achieve and how can we best measure those changes. In social development, usually the answer is to ask people good questions. The same applies to other terms, such as data (equals information).

 

Desmystify the subject

Monitoring and evaluation is research. But that doesn’t mean the subject has to be clouded by research process jargon. For example, data analysis can be broken down into a process of grouping responses to interviews or surveys into key messages, trends and ideas. We often suggest that teams measuring change present all their data on the wall or on a big table, so everything can be seen together. That makes it easier to spot key insights and other information.

Focus on the process

When an electrician or a plumber comes to my house to repair or install something, the technical language they use is often a barrier to me understanding what they are going to do. We have addressed language above. But not knowing the process also leaves me clueless about their work. The same applies to monitoring and evaluation. In supporting better practice, one of the most useful ways we have found to support people is to set out the steps required. We sometimes present the process visually, as a flights of stairs for example. Once people can see the steps, the whole process seems more manageable.

Build on the strengths of participants

Often, qualitative information is best collected through, for example, interviews and focus groups. It sounds obvious, but the backgrounds of certain professional or community groups can be very good preparation for this kind of work. For example, health workers are often skilled in putting people at ease and asking questions in a supportive and encouraging way. This means they are often very effective, once given the chance to practice and guidance on the way to facilitate a focus group, for example.

In our training programs, we like to introduce practice early on. We find that participants who might have approached M&E with indifference or fear, become animated and interested when they see how effective they can be in collecting information through talking to people.

Applying place-based approaches to strengthen social and community support systems

Applying place-based approaches to strengthen social and community support systems

As strategic partners of Spring Impact, we have been pleased to coordinate an international study of place-based approaches to early childhood development this year with support from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. The term ‘place-based’ was new to us, but it soon became clear how this way of thinking and doing underpins much of our work.

Place-based approaches shift the focus of development practice from projects and programs to place, meaning a particular sub-national geographic area such as a county, district, or municipality. The logic underlying these approaches is that wellbeing is closely tied to geography, and that improving the situation for people living there requires adaptive, responsive, and cooperative action by a diverse array of actors. Instead of prescribing a particular set of activities to address a complex social need or problem, place-based approaches compel a wide range of people from different sectors and sections of the community to ask, ‘How can we work together to make this a better place?’

This logic links social impact to locally-driven action. If wellbeing is closely tied to geography, and improving the situation for people living there requires adaptive and responsive action, then no one is better positioned to drive that action than the people most closely connected to that place. While many approaches to social and economic development value local participation and empowerment, place-based approaches frame local leadership, information, and decision-making as absolutely crucial to success.

This resonates strongly with our experience in social development settings. For example:

Stronger Communities for Children

The Stronger Communities for Children (SCfC) initiative strengthens capacity in remote Aboriginal communities to give children the best start in life. Working closely with our partners at Ninti One, and funded by the Australian Government, we have aimed to ensure that local people have a real say in decisions made about service delivery. In 2017, Community Works conducted a literature review on Collective Impact that informed the strategic framework used by Ninti One to design and implement SCfC. Since then, Steve Fisher has worked closely with local communities to plan, monitor, evaluate, and learn from the initiative. Their guide for measuring local change can be viewed here.  Listen to community board members discuss their experiences with SCfC here.

Mental Health Friendly Cities  

Community Works has supported the Mental Health Friendly Cities initiative since its inception as a key partner of citiesRISE, a global platform for transforming mental health policy and practice. The initiative focuses on urban municipalities as drivers of change, places where cross-sectoral cooperation to integrate measures for improving mental health can lead broader systems change. Mental Health Friendly Cities facilitate and leverage leadership by young people to change the narrative around mental health, improve access to support, foster social cohesion and create environments that are conducive to wellbeing. Coordinated action at the local level and sharing of knowledge across cities are crucial factors in identifying proven solutions and accelerating their uptake.

Grant Activity Reviews

In partnership with Ninti One, Community Works has been reviewing a government-funded program for socio-economic development in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across Australia. These reviews are ‘place-based’ in the sense that evaluation teams take a holistic, cross-sectoral approach to understanding the impact of the program in specific remote areas, and determining strategies for improvement that build on local strengths and target the needs and aspirations of local people. Part of Community Works’ role in this work has been to prepare briefing reports that equip evaluation teams with rich contextual information about each place they visit, including local history, demographics, health and education data, culture, and topical issues that should be factored into the review process.

In each of the examples above, we work with our partners to take an in-depth, holistic look into particular places and how they function, in order to empower local people to drive programs and services that produce social benefits for the whole population. 

At Community Works, we understand that strong, healthy and empowered communities are basic building blocks for development. In our experience, place-based approaches are especially powerful when working with First Nations and other communities whose identities and belief systems are closely tied to land. From this cultural standpoint, place-based thinking is highly intuitive.

As national and international development agencies and funding bodies become more interested in place-based approaches, we see great potential for improving the alignment of large-scale initiatives with local agendas, value systems and ways of thinking. Investing in a place-based approach means supporting strong relationships between people working together for positive social change. It means strengthening information flows from communities to service providers to governments and back again. It means trusting the people most closely connected to a place to drive local decision-making, because they are the ones best positioned to lead progress toward a shared vision. For national and international agencies, it means playing a supporting role rather than the lead.

For all of these reasons, Community Works sees place-based thinking as both highly compatible with self-determination and highly pragmatic when it comes to achieving better outcomes for disadvantaged populations.  We look forward to contributing to the emerging evidence base on these approaches, and continuing to work with our partners to support best practice.

Click here to read our report ‘Scaling up place-based strategies to strengthen community early childhood systems’

Visual methods for working with community groups

Visual methods for working with community groups

Visual methods

for working with community groups   

Steve Fisher

This article responds to requests we have received for more information on visual methods that enable productive conversations with community groups. These conversations may be around problems they are seeking to tackle, the planning of a project, the airing of views on a particular subject or other situations in which someone is facilitating a session with a group of local people.

Rather than provide a detailed description of each method, I will provide an overview and the key principles that underlie it. There are variations to each one and different ways they can be adapted to meet particular situations. I am not claiming that these methods have been developed by Community Works, although we have certainly come up with visual tools and adapted existing methods. But often good ideas have emerged from discussions and planning of workshops with our clients and partner organisations and tailored to the specific situation. This is especially the case over several years of working with Ninti One. Some of the methods described here have also been inspired by specialists in a particular subject. The best-known proponent of mind maps, for example, is Tony Buzan.

Timelines

We have written about the River of Time method in a separate article about working with Minyerri community with Enterprise Learning Projects. It involves a group of people drawing the key events relating to a project or a place in a river depicted by two parallel and winding lines on flipchart papers. The river then becomes the overall flow of the history of the project or place. During an evaluation for Amnesty International, we had a similar experience of inviting activists and staff in Latin America to draw their journey through the program we were evaluating. Some chose to draw a road, others a river and some presented a set of events linked together.

Another example of a timeline came from a training workshop we facilitated for Enterprise Learning Projects in which Aboriginal small enterprises participated. One of the most valuable parts was when we drew and discussed a visual timetable for setting up a new enterprise, from sitting under a tree to discuss the idea to opening to doors of a café or a used clothes shop, for example.

Whichever timeline method is used, the value lies in a group of people discussing what has happened over time as they draw it together and then, with the help of a facilitator, making overall sense of the story and learning from it.

stakeholder maps

This method is well-established in development practice. It is easily adaptable to different situations. The basic idea is to draw shapes that represent individuals, groups or organisations that have relationships with each other or to another organisation (such as your own). The lines and arrows that connect them, the colours used to draw them, the distance between each one, the size of each shape and their position within the scheme as a whole can be used to denote aspects of the current stakeholder landscape. For example, a government department might be a large shape while women’s groups in neighbouring communities might be depicted as small shapes with close and strong links to each other, if that represents reality.

We have used this method many times. Ninti One devised a sophisticated version shown in the photo below and which grouped service providers in a community according to the sector in which they worked (such as health or youth services). The groups in this workshop then moved individual stakeholders to show how they planned to manage relationships for the future benefit of the program.

Again, the value of the method is in the conversation that ensues. If people have a different view on how the pieces of a stakeholder map should be drawn, then we can all learn from those differences and why they have occurred. For example, a government department might communicate quite differently to the CEO of an organisation than the community-based workers.

Mind Maps

We have used mind maps to encourage and record discussions on specific subjects with groups of widely-varying numbers, from three people to eighty. They work well when the purpose is to encourage discussion on a single topic, like community attitudes on road safety or the quality of housing. In these situations, the topic is written in the middle of a large sheet of paper and the facilitator invites comments from the group. Everything spoken is recorded on the map and this encourages participants to become active in the conversation, because they can see their ideas being heard.

This kind of visual mapping is especially valuable for small group work in training workshops, for example, or with boards or committees. In focus groups, drawing the conversation on a whiteboard helps people who may be reticent to speak to people they may not know. Facing the whiteboard to do the exercise, rather than each other in a roundtable setting, can be easier for everyone at the outset, depending on local cultural considerations too. It can become a lively process as the group helps the facilitator draw the conversation and then develop and connect the branches of the map as it develops.

Mosaics

Using the principle that all these methods are simply ways to have a productive conversation that helps a community analyse, plan or better understand an issue, mosaics work well because everyone can easily get involved. The best recent example was the model of governance we worked on with participants at the recent Knowledge-Sharing Seminar for the Stronger Communities for Children program. As people suggested components or principles or good governance, we built up a mosaic on the floor that was then presented back to participants in a visual report produced afterwards.

Mosaics, tiles or jigsaw-based methods are very flexible too, as the pieces can be moved around and the words written on each piece can be changed as the conversation develops and new ideas emerge.

Trees

Given that most development work is about growing something (capacity, knowledge, products, confidence, etc.), a tree is a very effective visual method. We have found that they work well as a way for a group to become active early in a meeting, when we might all be a little shy and apprehensive. If there are many people in the room and likely to be others arriving late, drawing a tree shape on the wall and asking people to stick notes on the branches that represent achievements or results of a program is positive way to break the ice. People arriving after the session has started can easily pick up what is going on and join in.

Being clear about the purpose is important. For example, asking people to write the results of the project so far as leaves that are stuck on the tree is a good, strengths-based exercise. To be more analytical, fallen leaves could represent unfulfilled ideas and flowers or fruits could be skills, relationships or unexpected benefits that have been achieved. A watering can could be the ongoing work required to make the tree, and therefore the project, develop and grow. A lot can be done with the use of a simple tree device, so long as time is taken to properly read and share the contributions that everyone in the group has made and to reflect on what they mean for our understanding or the project as a whole.

 

All the methods above require one or more people to facilitate them. The role of the facilitator is to introduce the exercise, explain the purpose, encourage and support people to get involved, tackle any problems or doubts that arise along the way and then draw out the key insights.

Using visual methods without facilitating the process properly is risky. If participants lose confidence in the process, then it can be very difficult to maintain their commitment to further conversations and to achieve the purpose for which people have come together.  The facilitator helps the group gain most from the methods by encouraging them to learn from the information produced by each visual method.

Review and reflection instead of evaluation

Review and reflection instead of evaluation

All development projects and programs need and deserve to be evaluated. A good evaluation measures impact, generates new knowledge on program design and provides insights on how to improve the work. An even better one engages participants and beneficiaries in the research required to conduct the evaluation.  

Sometimes an organisation will want to achieve some of these benefits but without a full evaluation. The reasons may be varied, including that their program is not fully implemented, they are trialling an idea with limited resources or they prefer an approach that is more exploratory than a typical robust third-party evaluation. In our experience, situations in which a more limited review or analysis of a project is being sought by an organisation are quite common. While a rigorous independent evaluation is valuable, there is also a role for more modest processes. The following examples come from our work:

Perspectives of users

The Eritrean Community in Australia asked Community Works to provide an overview of the views of the participants in their programs and the users of their services. We conducted surveys and interviews with a cross-section of people and provided the results in a summary report that enabled the organisation to gain insights they could not otherwise easily achieve.

Review of program strategy

Engaged by Prahran Mission, we undertook a short review of an existing program that was being replicated in a new location. The organisation wanted advice on what was working well and what could be improved. We reviewed program plans and reports, conducted interviews of key individuals and compared the strategies being used with good practice examples internationally.

Support to internal reviews

Organisations may consider they have the necessary skills to review a program, but require advice on the design and management of the process, the data to collect and how best to analyse it. We recently performed this kind of support role for an NGO that implements rural education programs, enabling them to research and review their programs using existing staff skills. The idea was not to replace an evaluation, but to reflect on the work to inform a new strategy being developed for the organisation.

Understanding a problem

Working for a client of Ninti One, we assisted the organisation to work out why a group of vulnerable people in remote Aboriginal communities were not making use of government services designed to assist them. By locating the individual residents and inviting them to talk to us about their lives, their needs and the suitability of the services on offer, we helped Ninti One produce the necessary analysis and recommendations that would enable improvements to the services to be made.

Case studies

It can be very useful for the story to be told of an individual or a family who has benefitted from a program. Working on a program review in Nepal, we went to visit former participants in a mental health initiative and asked if they could share their stories for the purposes of in the form of a case study. Achieving a story of this kind requires trust to be developed between the story-teller and the story-writer, which means that more than one visit is certainly necessary. The end result can shed light on ways in which an organisation can best anticipate future challenges faced by participants. In mental health, this may include overcoming discrimination from others that creates barriers to work.

In all these examples, and many others, a critical starting point is to define the question the organisation is seeking to answer. For the example above on understanding a problem, the question is obvious since the client needed to know why services were under-used. For others, bringing rigour to the process commences with identifying the right question. For example, a review might seek to know ‘how does our work compare with current leading practice elsewhere?’ or ‘how can we more closely meet the needs of the community?’.

As well as the methods described above, there can be a role for group work in mapping and analysing the work of an organisation. Please see our separate article on visual methods for working with community groups, which provides further examples.

Some reflections on mental health for World Refugee Day

Some reflections on mental health for World Refugee Day

World Refugee Day. My mother was not a refugee, but she wanted to be.

My mother was not a refugee, but she wanted to be. Her family applied for protection visas to escape the war unfolding all around them in Europe, but by the time they gained entry to the United States the bombs had stopped dropping. They fled to Austria from Germany, where my grandfather had been the conductor of the Radio Berlin Orchestra. The year my mother was born, he was dismissed from his position for refusing to fire Jewish musicians. Sensing the growing dangers in Berlin, the family moved to Salzburg, where the Nazis soon expanded their occupation. My mother spent the early years of her life running from air raids, hiding in caves and under bridges, scrounging to get enough food, and fighting to survive serious illnesses that kill many children of war. Today, as she turns 81, she is putting the finishing touches on a novel based on this history, dovetailed with the history of my father, a U.S. soldier who ran through blood-red water at Normandy on D-Day and then survived the Battle of the Bulge.

When I was growing up, both of my parents still struggled with their mental health and wellbeing as a result of their wartime experiences. They were both plagued by terrifying nightmares, episodes of depression, and irrational fears concerning my safety. My father was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when I was a teenager, and the illness made our home life extremely tense and unpredictable. It also had economic impacts as he became progressively incapacitated by the condition, and was no longer able to maintain his small business. My mother was pulled in all directions at once: caring for him, caring for me, and trying to keep a roof over all of our heads. This compounded her own challenges to mental health and wellbeing, and her resilience during the final years of my father’s life – and indeed the years following his death – still astounds me.

As a product of this environment, it is no surprise that I have spent much of my career studying peace, conflict, mental health and wellbeing. This year, the intersection of these elements has featured prominently in our work with the World Psychiatric Association (WPA). Last year, the WPA announced a new direction that prioritises the mental health and wellbeing of people facing conditions of extreme adversity, including the traumas inflicted by war. With most of the world’s 25.4 million refugees living in countries with less than one psychiatrist for every 100,000 inhabitants, community-based initiatives will be vital to this effort. For this reason, the WPA has sought research and advice from Community Works to develop its implementation strategy.

As part of this work, I was pleased to prepare a briefing paper to support a WPA planning workshop held in Madrid earlier this year. Specifically, the paper was created as a resource for the Alliance Project, which is being developed in partnership with the Juan José López-Ibor Foundation to better address the mental health needs of people affected by war, natural disasters, and other emergency situations. The paper reviewed the international evidence surrounding post-emergency mental health and wellbeing, and provided examples of how psychiatrists have supported communities to integrate psychosocial interventions into emergency response systems.

The work of the Alliance Project is important because war and other emergencies interrupt life for the people and communities affected by them on multiple levels:

  • Individuals who survive the initial trauma often face physical and practical challenges such as homelessness, hunger, injury, and disease.
  • At the same time, many also face the emotional distress of losing loved ones, livelihoods, and their sense of safety and stability.
  • Socially, survivors are often left with a narrower and less predictable support network as their family, friends, and community members struggle with similar physical, practical and emotional challenges.
  • Many of the people who engage in the task of supporting survivors are also survivors themselves, adding yet another level of challenge (Cohen 2002).

Left unaddressed, these complex psychological and social challenges can compound to generate further impacts at the community level, including endemic family violence, political and economic instability, and barriers to long-term peace (Whiting 2015).

Young children, in particular, require better psychosocial support following violent conflict, a point that stood out strongly in the literature we reviewed. In places with little mental health infrastructure, interventions designed to fill the gap face great challenges reaching entire populations of children. A systematic review of mental health and psychosocial support interventions for children affected by armed conflict in low- and middle-income countries found that:

Overall, interventions appeared to show promising results… However, these positive intervention benefits are often limited to specific subgroups. There is a need for increased diversification in research focus, with more attention to interventions that focus at strengthening community and family support, and to young children, and improvements in targeting and conceptualizing of interventions (Jordans et al. 2016, p. 8)

As the work of the WPA and the Alliance Project moves forward, it will continue to build from the existing evidence base to develop better support systems for communities affected by war and other widespread emergencies, with special attention to generating better outcomes for children and young people.

My role in this work will be to continue providing research support and evidence-based guidance. This includes coordinating a publication that Community Works will produce in partnership with the WPA and citiesRISE to inform mental health and psychosocial interventions for people facing conditions of persistent, extreme, and complex adversity.

Community Works will share that publication later this year, and I especially look forward to sharing it with my mother, who knows first hand that children who live through war need all the support they can get.

To all the refugees out there, I pay tribute to your strength, resilience, and determination to seek out a more peaceful life. I encourage you to tell your stories, which the world very much needs to hear. And to my mother I send wishes for a very happy birthday.