Participatory Approaches to Evaluation
Guide and checklist
What is participatory evaluation?
Participatory evaluation of strategies to end sexual violence on campus is a participant-driven, collaborative approach, involving stakeholders and community in the evaluation process. Using a participatory approach to conducting evaluation has become increasingly prevalent in evaluating strategies addressing sexual violence as evaluators recognize that community members have important insights and knowledge about key issues that can contribute to the successful implementation, and evaluation of sexual violence reduction programs.
Participatory evaluation can occur at any stage of the evaluation process. A participatory approach can be taken with both quantitative and qualitative data and underpins many methodological approaches. Participatory evaluation can offer a way to integrate the evaluation activity into programming or strategy itself.
How participatory?
There exists a continuum within participatory evaluation. Stakeholders have varying understandings of what participatory means and where they want to position themselves along that continuum. While including participants in all aspects of evaluation design and implementation may seem optimal it can actually be onerous to the participants. Participants may only want to participate in specific aspects of the evaluation process. For example, students may be eager to help develop an arts-based data gathering activity but may not want to code and analyze evaluation data. College administration may want to be involved in meetings and discussions throughout the evaluation process in order to be able to understand key issues and develop effective policy but they may not want to actively participate in the arts-based evaluation. Being open, accepting, and grateful for the varied levels of participation offered by stakeholders is important. Keep in mind that the key objective is to include the participant’s insights, and perspectives respecting and privileging their voices and contributions. The focus of participatory approaches to evaluation is to design the evaluation in a way that creates opportunities for multiple perspectives from across the campus to be shared, and for those who might otherwise be excluded from conversation to be heard. The more mundane or applied aspects of the evaluation, such as organizing an activity or uploading data may not be where participants want to devote their attention or resources. When engaging in a participatory approach it’s important to be inclusive while also being respectful of participants’ time and energy.
Intersectionality in the evaluation process has concrete benefits.
Applying an intersectional lens, providing a voice to those not typically heard or included in the evaluation process are key objectives of a participatory approach. Including a wide-range of perspectives can make your evaluation more effective and diverse voices from marginalized or ‘at risk’ communities can provide insights about whether the strategies you are implementing are effective within hard to reach or deeply impacted populations.
Inclusion can be empowering to stakeholders across campus sectors, who are ordinarily not consulted but who are essential to addressing sexual violence on campus. While participants may not have the resources, training or desire to conduct evaluation alone, they may have valuable expert knowledge about life as a student, staff or community member that can shape and guide participatory evaluation in significant ways. Through collaborative approaches participants can bring problems, issues of concern, methodologies, ways of understanding and doing, to the forefront that stakeholders from other capacities may never otherwise be aware of. As with most initiatives, combined intelligence leads to more creative, innovative solutions, fresh perspectives, and insights.
Having participants from within the community participate in evaluation can increase comfort and trust for those who are answering the evaluation questions, sharing their experience, and knowledge. Creating spaces for participants from the community to authentically shape and contribute to the evaluation can help evaluators understand which questions are important to specific communities, how to ask questions in ways that are relevant, appropriate, trauma-informed or culturally sensitive. Participatory approaches increase ‘buy-in’ from the community because the evaluation is viewed as more relevant and the evaluation results are often viewed as more credible.
Challenges of participatory approaches
However, balancing a variety of demands from funders and varied methodologies can make opening up evaluation for full participation challenging. Traditionally, research methods that are considered rigorous are top-down, privileging expert voices with little space for participants to collaborate and for participants voices to be heard and shape the evaluation. Balancing demands from funders or administrators, limited resources in terms of time or budget or limited capacity for a participatory approach in some methods can make opening up evaluation for full participation challenging.
The following is a step-by-step guide and checklist for program leaders and facilitators who want to incorporate some level of participatory evaluation in their assessment plans.
Checklist
Allocate sufficient resources
Have you allocated sufficient time and space for evaluation and for the process of including participants in discussing the research process, developing research questions, and making meaning of the data? All of these evaluation activities can take time when you are doing them in a truly participatory way. To be truly participatory you need to allow time for participants to contribute.
Build stakeholder participation into a project from the beginning
Including community stakeholders in designing the evaluation provides a more robust evaluation that potentially asks questions that an external evaluator might not have the lived experience or insights to consider.
Examine the role of power in your evaluation plan
Are you examining and challenging traditional researcher-participant, expert-layperson, and power dynamics? When working with young people are you challenging adult-child, teacher-student roles? For instance, if you are inviting young people to participate in evaluation, are you offering meaningful roles for them to participate in the evaluation process or is the participatory approach perfunctory? Does your evaluation plan include roles for participants in the governance structure or in a capacity that authentically shapes the evaluation? (e.g., have you considered assembling a youth or student advisory committee to engage in evaluation of the program or study, including them in the development process by eliciting ideas for what research questions need to be asked, how data could be gathered, what approaches and methodologies to employ, and who needs to be included).
Take a trauma-informed and survivor-centered approach.
It is important to use a trauma-informed and survivor-centered approach when eliciting or engaging with participants. A survivor-centered and trauma-informed approach to evaluation values and respects survivors, while working to acknowledge trauma with the sensitivity needed to provide effective evaluation. It is based in an understanding of trauma and “seeks to empower the survivor by prioritizing [their] rights, needs, and wishes” (UNICEF, 2010, as cited by the UN Women Virtual Knowledge Centre to End Violence against Women and Girls, 2011). Trauma-informed evaluation can be integrated and streamlined from initial evaluation design to the closing review, and prioritizes participants’ subjectivity, by doing evaluation that is not (re)triggering, instead is grounded in compassion-based resiliency, builds rapport, and is effective in not only creating the change, but being the change you want to see on campus.
Please review the trauma-informed evaluation section of the toolkit, which defines the approach to evaluation, best practices, and specifics on how to design and conduct a trauma-informed evaluation, data collection from a trauma-informed point of view, as well as a checklist.
Take an intersectional
approach
Include participation from individuals of diverse backgrounds (e.g., consider socio-economic status, age, gender, abilities, ethnicity, and religions, etc.). Actively creating opportunity for intersectionality within the evaluation provides an even more robust and credible outcome as a representative range of perspectives shape the evaluation.