A common scenario in development work is that outsiders wish to talk with a community. The purpose could be to consult with them about a particular subject, gauge their interest in a new program or seek their views on how a problem might best be tackled. Commonly, the outsiders are from a government agency, an NGO or a consulting company. The community people could be staff of local organisations, members of the local council, selected population groups (such as parents of young children) or people invited at random to meet the visitors.
In recent months I have worked on several projects for different clients that have involved exactly these kinds of processes. Subjects of discussion have included eye health, new child care services, parenting skills, education initiatives, collective impact and mental health. In development practice, the over-arching term for this work is community engagement.
Community engagement refers to the process of building working relationships between external professionals and local people and groups. While good practice in community engagement can be achieved through applying certain principles and strategies, what has struck me about the work we have been doing recently is that the way the questions are framed has been critically important.
Let me explain.
When an outsider asks questions of somebody from a community, they are almost always being intrusive. This can happen even if the subject matter seems innocuous. For example, if I ask someone to tell me about the condition of housing in the community because the organisation I represent is interested in helping to improve it, this might appear to be a reasonable question about materials and maintenance. But it can mean more than that to the people being asked the question.
Years ago, I worked as a surveyor for the National Housing Survey in the United Kingdom and noticed how anxious people became when telling me their bathroom was mouldy or their roof leaked. Asking questions about these subjects invites the participant to point out where something has gone wrong in the design, construction or maintenance of the place where they live. Maybe they feel responsible or negligent. Perhaps they are nervous about pointing out shortcomings in the work of other people or organisations.
An important principle is to recognise that many subjects are sensitive and community consultation can be intrusive. If the condition of housing is a sensitive subject, so will be topics around education, health, water use, parenting, enterprise and almost any other subject. The way questions are framed is therefore important if outsiders are to encourage people to participate in the conversation in a way that suits them best. By framing I refer to the way we say something, how we say it, what we include or leave out and what we emphasise. There may be several ways of asking a question and each one can lead to a different level of comfort and engagement by the person to which it is asked.
Here are some insights on ways we have framed questions to encourage people to respond without feeling pressured, disempowered or even offended:
Questions should be asked in a respectful way, as part of a conversation. To achieve this aim, the outsider should use a set of topics for discussion instead of a list of rigid questions that they must complete. People should not feel that they are under pressure to respond.
Example:
Have you any thoughts about safety in the community? Is there anything you have seen or heard that might help improve safety?
At the same time, it is important to avoid words than may be common in a professional work setting but are rarely heard in the community, especially where people are using English as a second or third language. For example, if I ask someone ‘what aspects of the youth program did you like the best?’, the word aspects might be entirely new and not clear to them. A better way to ask the question could be ‘what did you like about the youth program?’.
Similarly, some words may be used differently in the community to the way they are used in a professional workplace. For example, if I ask ‘what conditions need to be in place for the program to be successful?’, people may interpret conditions as being about the state of something, like the condition of a car. Removing the word from the question makes it easier to understand, like this ‘what needs to be in place for the program to be successful?’.
Referring to one of the questions above, ‘Can you tell me how using the sports facilities has been for you?’, it would be easy to say ‘Can you tell me how the experience of using the sports facilities has been for you?’’ but the word experience might confuse people and so it is best left out. In trying to use plain English, I make mistakes all the time. Getting better is an ongoing challenge.
To conclude, the discipline required in thinking through the way in which questions are framed and the words that are used is a healthy one. There is an important ethical dimension to the subject due to the potential for causing harm to relationships in the community or intruding on delicate matters through insensitive questions.
