Section 4: Practical Strategies and Tools
In this section you will find practical tools and strategies for undertaking PAR processes. These include:
- Strengths and resources scans
- PAR skills audit
- Checklist for starting PAR
- Participatory strategies for ‘finding out’
- Other strategies for ‘finding out’
- Strategies for enabling participation
- Templates for recording your PAR
- Processes for analysing and reflecting on what you have found.
These tools are not intended to be prescriptive. Rather you are invited to try them out, modify them or develop others better suited to your context.
4.1 Strengths and Resources
PAR cannot be imposed. To be successfully incorporated as an element of practice, PAR requires the support and contribution of a variety of stakeholders and it needs to be tailored to your particular context. It might even be useful to ‘Action Research’ how you develop your PAR capacity. Don’t assume it will just happen.
Understanding the potential strengths and resources that can be mobilised for a PAR process is fundamental. A strengths perspective enables you to focus on the capacities and potentialities of your agency, your service users and your community of other stakeholders. ‘Listening to’ or ‘listening for’ the strengths in your community can motivate people to participate. It enables you to positively engage with your stakeholders and the unique contribution they can make to planning and action. Collaborative work will also need to acknowledge the constraints that are operating in any given context so you can work within these, or develop strategies in response to them. For further reading on this topic see Karen Healy’s essay entitled: Asset-based Community Development: Recognising and Building on Community Strengths in O’Hara, A and Weber, Z. (2006). See also Karen Healy’s chapter on ‘The Strengths Perspective’, in Social Work Theories in Context: Creating Frameworks for Practice (2005) and Dennis Saleebey’s The Strengths Perspective in Social Work Practice (2006).
4.1.1 Strengths and resources scans
An environmental scan enables you to identify the range of strengths and resources in your agency/service, in the network of services, and in your local community. It is these inherent strengths and resources of your context that need to be identified, engaged and developed. The following tool provides questions for you to consider when scanning for the strengths and resources of your agency (internal) and your community of stakeholders (external).
| The strengths and resources of our agency/service | Responses |
|---|---|
What is the structure of our agency? What are our strengths? What resources can we dedicate to initiating a PAR process? What parts of the agency need to be, or would benefit from being, involved in the PAR process? What PAR values are present in our agency, or the relevant part of the agency? (see Section 1) Are there already processes within our agency that reflect PAR values or processes? (See Section 3.6 on an Action Research system) How open or closed is our agency to include others, for example, clients and other agencies in service development planning and reflection? Should this include some groups more than others? What concerns or challenges exist in implementing PAR values and processes? Who is/should be responsible for ensuring PAR has endorsement, time and resources? What agency constraints will need to be acknowledged and managed? Are there any other relevant questions we as an agency need to address in order to undertake PAR? |
| The strengths and resources of our community | Responses |
|---|---|
How do the history, character and culture of our community/locality affect how we encourage involvement in a local early intervention strategy with a PAR component? What/who are the key ‘first to know’ agencies in our community? What relationships currently exist with these? What networking/collaborative mechanisms already exist that may be involved in a PAR initiative? Who is ‘on board’ already? Who isn’t? What other relationships with key stakeholders will be important to acknowledge and develop? What community strengths and resources could we mobilise? How will we build an inventory of community strengths? Who from other services and the community has or could quickly develop some understanding of PAR and its role in early intervention? What communication strategy could we develop to facilitate greater understanding of and engagement with a PAR process? What other relevant questions need to be addressed regarding the involvement of other services and the community? |
4.1.2 PAR skills audit
To undertake PAR you will need to assess what relevant skills you and those you are working in collaboration with already have, and what additional skills you will collectively need to undertake a PAR process. The Table on page 55 lists the key skills in human services delivery relevant to PAR. These include relationship building, communication, group work, community work, organisational coordination, research and so on. The audit tool is designed to assist you to acknowledge the skills you and others involved have, and note the gaps or areas that need development, specialist input or training. You can do this individually or as a group exercise, and it can also be used as a resource for identifying training needs.
Remember PAR is not about starting from scratch with a whole new set of values, skills and knowledge. Most services are used to translating their terms of reference, funding guidelines, theoretical frameworks and policies and procedures into ‘real world’ human service practice. It is your human service understandings, questions and competencies that will drive AR initiatives. In the 2007 – 2008 summary report Reconnect and NAYSS services identified that their ‘own knowledge and training were a barrier to successfully designing and running Action Research projects’. Training opportunities about the language and methods of PAR will improve your confidence and your capacity to plan, deliver and report on effective research (ARTD 2009, p.iii).
The following tool is designed to assist you to identify the skills needed for PAR, the current skills of those in your PAR project, any areas needing development or training, and those areas where additional assistance would be useful. Remember service users are also experts in their own lives and in the life of their community.
| Interpersonal and counselling skills | Related PAR skills | Our strengths - gaps – need to develop – need to seek specialist input – need for training - and so on |
|---|---|---|
| Group work skills | Related PAR skills | Our strengths - gaps – need to develop – need to seek specialist input – need for training - and so on |
| Community work skills | Related PAR skills | Our strengths - gaps – need to develop – need to seek specialist input – need for training - and so on |
| Organisational Skills | Related PAR skills | Our strengths - gaps – need to develop – need to seek specialist input – need for training - and so on |
| Research Skills | Related PAR skill | Our strengths - gaps – need to develop – need to seek specialist input – need for training - and so on |
| Relationship building | Ability to form trusting, credible and respectful relationships with your clients, the community and its organisations. | |
| Communication skills | Ability to engage with people and to invite people to express their thoughts, ideas and views. Ability to actively listen. Ability to create safe space and use plain language when communicating about your work and PAR. Ability to clearly explain PAR and how it could work in your context with your stakeholders. Ability to communicate a genuine wish to enable people’s access to a local PAR process and to give value to their contribution. | |
| Problem solving | Ability to identify and communicate that you value hearing and understanding what is working well and what is not working well. Ability to hear and give value to people’s concerns, ideas and hunches. Ability to cooperate and collaborate with people from diverse backgrounds and/or roles in order to develop Participatory Action Research questions. Ability to identify and mobilise resources – what is available and how to gain access to them. Ability to set goals within your agency and with your stakeholders and continually review your progress. Ability to manage emotional issues in crisis situations. | |
| Empathy | Ability to listen to and attend to people’s concerns in a way that promotes safety and people’s capacity to participate. Ability to genuinely respect diverse perspectives, values and cultures. Ability to look at things from the client’s or stakeholder’s frame of reference. | |
| Seeking understanding | Ability to step back and reflect on your assumptions and values. Ability to remain somewhat sceptical about what will ‘work’. Ability to value making time for non-chaotic reflection. Able to cope with an open and transparent process and a shared reporting of insights. | |
| Observation | Ability to observe and describe what happened without jumping to interpretation. | |
| Flexibility | Ability to take on new information, change direction and modify questions, plans and strategies along the way. Ability to juggle a number of projects/research questions at a time. | |
| Facilitation | Ability to support people to have their say in focus groups or meetings. Ability to manage the ‘high talkers’ to ensure everyone has an opportunity to speak and be heard. Ability to ensure a clear mechanism for facilitation is established with a reference group or other collaborative mechanisms. Ability to deal constructively with group disagreements and conflicts. Ability to debrief and support those who are ‘new’ to participation. Ability to ensure that transparency and a clear and agreed upon documentation/reporting method is accepted by members of group processes. | |
| Group development | Ability to provide support, resources and opportunities for groups to be established and sustained. For example, a parents’ group. | |
| Evaluation | Ability to assist groups to negotiate, understand and name outcomes (intended and unintended). | |
| Creativity | Ability to be open to having fun and being comfortable with different ways of doing things. | |
| Empowerment | Ability to take steps to allow the least powerful to be heard and have influence. | |
| Negotiation skills | Ability to communicate, problem solve and seek agreement when working with diverse groups, for example, protocols and referral policies. | |
| Networking | Ability to actively work ‘with’ other people/groups/services, rather than ‘flying solo’ and trying to solve all the problems on your own. Ability to facilitate connection between people and groups in your community. Ability to initiate activities and convene meetings to create opportunities for people to come together to work on achieving specific goals. | |
| Small ‘p’ political skills | Ability to use language and processes that make it easy to be involved. Ability to negotiate access to resources and systems. Ability to respect and understand protocols and customs, for example, cultural norms. Ability to identify key people - the ‘movers and shakers’ - and make the most of what they have to offer. Ability to support and reassure people who feel threatened by change. | |
| Resource auditing | Ability to identify community strengths and resources. Ability to identify the key community issues. Ability to identify the challenges and constraints. | |
| Community development and education | Ability to assist people from diverse backgrounds to become involved in building a community’s capacity for early intervention through PAR. | |
| Facilitation skills | Ability to work with diverse groups of people. Ability to assist people to generate their own ideas/solutions/meanings. | |
| Cross cultural competencies | Ability to listen to and work with people in ways that respect and incorporate their ‘cultures’. Ability to negotiate guidelines and facilitate communication between groups who may not use the same language and/or have different understandings of things. Ability to pay attention to what it will take for different communities to ‘own’ certain strategies/actions. | |
| Motivating | Ability to engage with and educate those involved. Ability to inspire enthusiasm and highlight ‘what’s in it’ for various stakeholders. Ability to recognise and celebrate the achievements and skills of all those involved. | |
| Planning | Ability to work through how things will be done in fairly systematic ways. | |
| Information sharing | Ability to communicate and share information – to all stakeholders across the community – for example by developing a clear workable communication strategy. | |
| Policy development | Ability to use PAR insights to inform policy and service directions. Ability to document key findings in a way that promotes engagement with policy makers regarding key learning, program insights, service improvements etc. Ability to break down broad policy questions into manageable research questions. Ability to keep focused on big picture program goals while coordinating micro levels of inquiry. | |
| Time management | Ability to employ strategies to make effective use of time. For example allocating specific time for activity related to your PAR initiative. | |
| Conflict resolution | Ability to assess for and diffuse tensions across a broad range of groups. There may be times when you assess that a specialist facilitator is required to assist a working group or individuals who are unable to proceed due to conflict. Ability to creatively use conflict for learning. | |
| Team management | Ability to motivate and support the work of teams. Ability to ensure workloads/roles/tasks are realistic and appropriate for particular people or work groups. | |
| Monitoring | Ability to maintain the ‘quality’ of the PAR processes. Ability to assess the thoroughness/validity of what is happening. | |
| Marketing | Ability to communicate about the good practice and positive early intervention outcomes of community-based collaborations. For example, in succinct summary reports of a local strategy and its achievements. | |
| Report writing | Ability to report clearly in writing using plain language and providing an open and honest account of work undertaken, agency data, proposed projects etc. | |
Preparation for PAR (Traditional research often commences with a literature review) | Ability to undertake preliminary research to scope what has previously been done and learnt in relation to your issue or question. Do your homework - understand, critique and consider previous insights. | |
| Developing research questions | Ability to turn local issues/concerns/hunches into Action Research questions. Ability to engage stakeholders in conversation about observations, issues and critical questions. | |
| Deciding how to go about the research (often called the methodology) | Ability to work out the best way to gather and make sense of the information you need. Ability to cooperate with other stakeholders in relation to who, how, what, where, when and why research activity will occur. | |
| Ethical practice | Ability to understand and ensure the rights of all participants are respected throughout the process. Ability to interpret the relevant ethical codes and guidelines and apply these to the PAR project. Ability to ensure a transparent research process that respects all participants and seeks their consent if documentation material intends to name or include information and other inputs from participants. | |
| Documenting | Ability to set up a simple and efficient system for documenting the details of the process and the evidence you depend on. | |
| Data management | Ability to manage information and data effectively. This will involve working out the best time and physical or computer-based methods of managing your PAR information. | |
| Theory building | Ability to work out why things happened in partnership with others. | |
| Publicising/ publishing | Ability to share insights and findings publicly and in a way that allows for their evaluation. Ability to package the PAR story into a resource that can be shared (report, video, performance, newsletter etc.). |
4.2 Checklist for starting PAR
This checklist is designed for you to use very early in the PAR process. If you use it later you should include rows for things such as ‘Who are the stakeholders?’ etc.
| Key consideration | Existing strengths and opportunities | What else might be useful to do? |
|---|---|---|
| Agency-Management support for PAR | ||
| Agency-Management understanding of PAR | ||
| Specific endorsement to undertake PAR | ||
| Making time for PAR | ||
| Mechanisms for managing PAR | ||
| Internal agency scan | ||
| Community scan | ||
| PAR skills audit | ||
| Support, supervision and sounding boards | ||
| General ethical considerations | ||
| Anything else? |
4.3 Participatory strategies for ‘finding out’
PAR requires genuine participation and collaboration – allowing others to ask questions, to gather and interpret data, and for mistakes – or poor outcomes – to be seen as sources of learning rather than as risks to be avoided. Unfortunately funding arrangements can position some agencies as competitors rather than potential collaborators. PAR provides a means to work against the forces that undermine cooperation. The participation of key stakeholders is critical in PAR. Participation enables a comprehensive consideration of the big questions through smaller more targeted inquiries. Participation promotes understanding of different roles and responsibilities, the overlaps and gaps in service delivery and the different ways of making meaning and responding to issues and concerns. Participation promotes real collaboration, resource and information sharing, community links and networks and a greater capacity to respond holistically to critical social problems in vulnerable families and communities.
Key Stakeholders: Who could potentially be involved?
- Front-line early intervention workers
- Client individuals, groups and communities eg young people and their families
- Agency management
- Other service providers
- Larger local institutions - local schools, TAFE, universities
- Local government, and local offices of other levels of government
- Local community groups
- Local businesses
All stakeholders will be informants in your PAR process. Their views and opinions will influence the focus and course of the research activity. They can be engaged to participate in the variety of ways outlined below.
The challenge of meaningfully involving those most affected by a situation can be substantial. When the goal of early intervention relates to experiences such as homelessness or mental health, the individuals, groups and communities who are the users of services are usually and understandably more interested in timely and relevant responses rather than involvement in committees and bureaucratic processes. A challenge in running a PAR process is to invite and engage those ‘most affected’ to provide direction in what is explored and what interpretations are made. You will need to be quite creative in developing a mix of processes that are meaningful and inclusive for the diversity of stakeholders you have.
The discussion of how to achieve these conditions of mutual involvement, participation and collaboration are very similar to the discussions about how to achieve ‘community development’. For example, the more disempowered you are, the less hope you may have about either the value of participating or even the chances of something good coming out of it.
Wadsworth 1998, p.11
Informal conversations are one of the best ways to get people’s opinions and ideas. For example:
What could we do to …?
Do you have any thoughts on …?
What have you found useful for …?
Brainstorming is a much used group technique to generate a range of ideas and views through free association, though it can be a challenge to maintain the agreement that all suggestions are welcomed without critical comment (Wadsworth 1997, p.81). To boost the number of people who feel confident to contribute it can be useful to firstly brainstorm in smaller groups and bring back the ideas to the larger group.
When used to try to generate creative and imaginative new solutions, the results of brainstorming could be listed for further thought and discussion rather than expected or relied on to come up with the best solutions immediately. Sometimes it is helpful for people to go away and chew over all the possibilities, once they have been ‘put on the table’ by a group, and come back later.
Wadsworth 1997, p.81
A reference group can be established for a particular question or for your PAR more generally. Reference groups seek people’s views and feedback in a clearly invited and structured way. They enable the gathering of a broad range of views if composed of people from number of sectors/parts of the community. In one service, a reference group was composed of young people, parents, school personnel, the agency, police and other local community stakeholders who could provide valuable feedback, broad views and problem solving in relation to defining the PAR question and guiding the action plan.
An initial step was developing a reference group. This group consisted of 22 individuals, representing agencies in the provision of services to young people in the central Sydney area. Reference group members generated several potential Action Research questions.
Service provider
See Rice (2002) for tips on ‘reference groups that really work’.
Focus groups can provide feedback on particular issues or topics. They are good at capturing the views of a particular group or sub-population (such as a focus group of young people excluded from school), and for ‘drilling down’ into a particular topic (such as how a local service system might work more effectively). Focus groups encourage the exploration and sharing of people’s feelings, ideas, aspirations, reservations, and hunches. They can be organised in ways and take place in spaces that are culturally responsive and accessible for those involved.
Focus groups generally require strong sensitive facilitation and an atmosphere of respect and safety to enable participants to trust and engage with the process. See Dick (2003) for a very useful outline of how to facilitate a focus group that is structured but where the information provided is driven by the participants.
Co-researchers are those that work alongside you in the PAR process. They work ‘beside’ you developing processes, implementing strategies, interpreting data and evaluating change. Co-researcher groups can undertake part or all of the PAR for one or more questions. Co-research groups can also provide creative and innovative reporting via arts mediums such as video production, written stories and so on. Co-research groups tend to have diverse stakeholder membership, including service providers, clients where appropriate, and other relevant stakeholders.
Peer research by young people can take a number of forms. ‘Peer interviewers’ can be loosely defined as individuals with a connection to a specific target group with whom they share language and culture. Peer interviewers enable young people’s voices to be heard when otherwise they may be inaccessible. Peer interviewers can play a key role in a PAR process and they should be recognised accordingly.
A group of young people was set up to explore the question ‘what would it take for young people to feel safe about accessing [the service] for support?’ As part of a planning process, the young people coordinated their classmates’ answers to questionnaires and interviews, and completed the observation and reflection phases.
Their views and suggestions were used as the basis for further planning. The co-research group also produced a video for local schools that covered some of the issues raised in their inquiry processes.
Youth Homelessness Pilot Program service
As part of a planning process peer interviewers can enable their peers to answer questionnaires and be interviewed for their views and opinions in both the observation and reflection phases and the action implementation phase. Peer interviewers can provide rich information about youth issues, barriers to access, support needs, trust and privacy, attitudes and fears to specific issues or institutions and so on. An adult inquiry may not achieve the depth of feedback, especially if there is any anger, distrust or alienation being experienced by young people.
Peer interviewers were used at a local youth forum to determine what people were getting out of the forum, what they thought the benefits were, what they knew at the end compared to what they knew in the beginning & what their favourite things were.
Because it was young people asking the questions, the responses were more frank than they might have been with workers. Peer interviewers had to attend training each week for 6 weeks before the forum. Everyone was committed to the process, however some people were a bit shy and did less than others did. Peer interviewers helped each other out if they were feeling shame. Having training was sooooo important to making it work & building up the confidence needed to get out there & ask everyone how it was.
Manager, Anglicare Topend
Peer involvement can also be in other roles than that of ‘interviewer’. For example, in 2007 the Colony 47 NAYSS partnered with Relationships Australia to run a forum for African families in Hobart. They employed a young person to enhance the participation and feedback of other young people. The forum was called Strengthening Families in a New Country.
Two hundred people attended the one day Forum which included presentations by the Commissioner for Children, Anti-Discrimination Commissioner, Police and other relevant service info and also break out groups for participants to talk through issues.
For the Forum, Colony 47 NAYSS worked with a group of young African Australians from a local college to present on their insights, perspectives and experiences of settlement called “UNITY UNITED”. The workshop sessions, presentation and individual interviews with the young participants were videoed and edited into a documentary, UNITY UNITED. We employed a young person from the client group, to co-coordinate this project with a NAYSS worker. The young person was responsible for:
- Encouraging interest and support from peers
- Ensuring material and resources were age and culturally responsive
- Ensuring all material and resources authentically reflected the views and experiences of peers.
This approach provided skills and experience for the young person and immeasurable benefits for the authenticity and relevance of the project for the client group.
Colony 47
Although sometimes similar to a co-research group, peer research is about those who are part of the target group playing a role in the PAR inquiry process. Peer research has particular utility in gaining information from ‘hidden populations’ but should not be limited to this.
A community development approach can support and empower people to take greater control of and responsibility for their situation. The role of a PAR facilitator is to focus people’s attention on the questions, problems and issues that arise and harness their strengths and capacities to create solutions. A community development approach involves effective consultation with all key stakeholders to ensure authenticity, agreed understandings and relevance to everyone’s unique lives, roles, perspectives and concerns. Effective consultation should enable participants to express their views in their own language. A thorough community development approach takes the time to build relationships, understand the different ideas and understandings about a particular question, and works to ensure there is some agreement about the direction of the inquiry. This requires careful work to ensure all those consulted – from decision makers, to clients, to community members – are recognised and empowered in the process. Creating structures (e.g. reference groups or regular project meetings) is important to ensure there is rich communication, acknowledgement, and a mechanism for flexible planning, implementation, feedback, discussion of findings, recommendations and the sharing of learning.
Most of the strategies mentioned above can include most stakeholders – e.g. informal conversation, reference group membership, being involved in a focus group. The following table lists a range of other participation strategies that can be utilised with different stakeholder groups.
| Who are the stakeholders? | Possible strategies |
|---|---|
| Agency management | Board meeting, staff meetings, strategic planning events, service evaluations, PAR training, informal discussion. |
| Your supervisor/ team leader | Supervision sessions, PAR training, critical incident debriefing. |
| Your clients | PAR training, peer audits of your service, peer interviewing, being interviewed by a peer interviewer, peer facilitation of groups/events, ‘panels of experts’ session (where they act in a ‘Brains Trust’ role), videoing what happens and feedback, video editing, ‘graffiti’ walls, community cultural development processes. |
| Other community service providers | Inter-agency meetings, seminars and forums, training events, special meetings, community consultations, informal networks/working relationships. |
| Local businesses | Attending a meeting of the local Chamber of Commerce/ business associations, phone calls, inviting to an agency event e.g. reference group meeting (if not a member), a Board meeting, AGM, a fundraiser, community consultations. |
| Members of the broader community | Newsletter and newspaper invitations, open forums, service open days, community consultations. |
| Other like services in other localities | Across program network mechanisms, invitations to provide input, reports, training events, informal networks/working relationships, feedback. |
4.4 OTHER STRATEGIES FOR ‘FINDING OUT’
There are a wide range of other methods that can be used as ways of generating insights, preferences and rankings of ideas from individuals or groups. A number of these are briefly described in Stringer (2007) and Wadsworth (1997).
- Informal interviews (referred to by Stringer 2007, p.69) as ‘guided reflection’
- Drawing maps and plotting key features (individual or group based)
- A guided tour
- Surveys (more useful in the later stages of a PAR process to include input from a wider range of people)
- Open Space Technology (this has been used in Reconnect and NAYSS at Good Practice Forums)
- Quality Circles
- Search Conference techniques
- Narrative and story telling
- Concept mapping
- Fishbowls
- Force-field analysis
4.5 ANALYSING: STRATEGIES FOR REFLECTING ON WHAT YOU HAVE FOUND
Analysis is the process of distilling large quantities of information to uncover significant features and elements that are embedded …
Stringer 2007, p.95
In a participatory context such as PAR the meaning you make of your data will be negotiated – in other words, it will be what you agree it to be. That does not mean you should not make every effort to make the interpretations trustworthy. To maximise this you should use strategies for interpreting and analysing that suspend your ‘judgement’ and try to identify the story your information tells.
Stringer (2007, p.98-106) talks of two main processes for ‘distilling’ the information you have gathered. These are:
- Categorizing and coding, and
- Analysing key experiences.
These are briefly summarised below.
4.5.1 Categorising and coding
Categorising is about identifying a clear representation of the information (data) you have collected, by looking for common themes. A code is the name you give a particular category and is used as a tool for sorting through and organising the information (data) you have collected. You have to ‘suspend’ you own interpretations whilst you do this (as much as is possible anyway). To help in this use the verbatim principle as much as you can. This means using the words and concepts of the participants. Stringer (2007) suggests the following:
- Keeping different stakeholders themes separate at least at the beginning. This means they can ‘check’ your interpretations when you ‘share’ these back to them (if you didn’t do it together).
- Procedures involve:
- Reviewing the collected information within a stakeholder group or event
- Identifying the discrete ideas in the various contributions i.e. break it into its bits. For example, what ideas, activities, events, topics were raised in a particular focus group or information interview? This is called ‘unitizing the data’. You can use post-it notes or cards or other visual ways to code when doing this.
- Categorising and coding. Now you can cluster these single ideas into groups and give the cluster a name (called a code). Depending on the codes you use, you end up with lots of piles or only a few. Debates will rage about whether two piles are the same, related or different.
- Then you can look across stakeholders or across events and look for common themes. You might find different stakeholders have some different concerns or ways of seeing things, and that there are also some common themes or concerns across groups.
- You can then develop a way to describe what you have found.
4.5.2 Analysing key experiences
This type of analysis focuses on events that seem to have had (or you wonder if these have had) a significant impact on the experience of stakeholders. You can use this approach to explore what service users or stakeholders have experienced of a new strategy you want to evaluate.
By ‘unpacking’ these events we can learn the features of that experience that make them so meaningful, and in the process we extend our understanding of the way the issues affect their lives.
Stringer 2007, p.103
The steps suggested for this include:
- Identify key events/experiences
- Identify main features of each event/experience
- Identify the elements that compose the event/experience
- Identify themes.
This type of analysis can be used to help you analyse what people have said about key events, experiences or interventions in focus groups, workshops or interviews.
4.5.3 Displaying what you have found
You can do this via a range of strategies, including:
- Descriptive accounts
- Representative stories
- Themes
- Audio and/or visual presentations
- Statistics, and
- Tables and graphs.
For further reading check out Stringer (2007) Action Research, Chapter 5 titled ‘Think: Interpreting and Analysing’.
4.6 Templates for recording your PAR
Recording your PAR (sometimes called ‘documenting’) is a key challenge and there is no single way to do this. You will need to develop and adapt the way you record information to suit your individual situations and preferences. Generally you will need to use more than one recording strategy. Some of your recording tools may be structured and others quite flexible.
Different recording tools may be useful for planning, recording what happens, and reflection. Some assist you to capture lots of information (butchers paper notes from a workshop) while others act as ‘summary sheets’. These summaries document your main research activities and indicate where more detailed information is stored e.g. in the Reference Group minutes.
The following tools have been developed to assist you to record what happens, the processes and the insights. They are simple and practical and intended to assist in sorting information or developing key points. Various computer programs can also be used to record and sort information - for example, to identify the key themes from comments lodged in a feedback box.
These tools and your records are not an end in themselves. The objective is not about developing impressive piles of paper about what is happening. The real objective is to improve the outcomes for those you are trying to assist and develop practices that can contribute to this. The PAR tools in this kit are to help you and your community achieve this objective.
Feel free to mix and adapt those that seem to meet your particular needs. Or make up something that suits you better.
A visual template for summarising PAR
Recording example 2: A two-step planning proforma
(adapted from a template originally contributed by RAFT Wollongong to The Reconnect Action Research Kit)
TITLE OF OUR PAR PROJECT:
| Questions to ask | Prompts | Our PAR |
|---|---|---|
What area or broad theme do we want to look at? What is known about this already? | Do our homework by seeing what others have done and what others (including stakeholders) say. | |
| What is our question/s? | Macro or micro level? For example, ‘What would it take...?’ or ‘What could we do...?’ | |
| How is this linked to better outcomes for the people affected? | What are we seeking to change or explore and how does this link to better outcomes for those we are seeking to assist? | |
| Who should we involve in our PAR? | Seek stakeholders/ participants/those affected and list them here. | |
| What range of strategies might we first try? | What are the ideas brainstormed by participants? | |
| Of these what are our preferred strategies? | Negotiate and ‘prioritise’ strategies, taking into account ethical, strategic and resource considerations. | |
| Who needs to do what? | Indicate tasks, roles and issues to be considered by various people & agencies. | |
| What is our time line? | Put the actions in a timetable. | |
| What have we learnt so far? | List any observations, insights, issues or questions that have arisen throughout this planning process. |
| Questions to ask | Prompts | Our plan |
|---|---|---|
| What are we going to try? | Discuss the specific strategy you wish to try out in response to your PAR question | |
| Who is involved? | List the various people who are involved with carrying out and recording the strategy | |
| What is to be done by whom? | Map out and delegate tasks | |
| What ethical considerations exist and how will these be dealt with? | Map out issues and indicate how these will be safeguarded | |
| What timelines? | When are things to be done by? When will we meet to discuss? | |
| What will we record and how? | What methods will we use to record (observations), and who will do this? |
| PAR summary sheet 1 | Summary | Implications for where to from here |
|---|---|---|
| PAR summary sheet 2 | Summary | Observations, evidence, insights, new questions and issues |
| Theme or issue of interest | ||
Observe What is known about this already? What else might be useful to find out? Who else to ask? How will we go about this? | ||
Reflect How do we interpret the information we have gathered? What could we change to produce better outcomes for our clients? | ||
| Macro research question | ||
| Micro questions | ||
Plan What , Who, When | ||
Act The story | ||
Observe What happened, For different participants/ parties, What was recorded | ||
| Reflect (analyse) | ||
Share (and review, publish) Who, What, When, Where, How |
In this section you will find practical tools and strategies for undertaking PAR processes. These include:
- Strengths and resources scans
- PAR skills audit
- Checklist for starting PAR
- Participatory strategies for ‘finding out’
- Other strategies for ‘finding out’
- Strategies for enabling participation
- Templates for recording your PAR
- Processes for analysing and reflecting on what you have found.
These tools are not intended to be prescriptive. Rather you are invited to try them out, modify them or develop others better suited to your context.
4.1 Strengths and Resources
PAR cannot be imposed. To be successfully incorporated as an element of practice, PAR requires the support and contribution of a variety of stakeholders and it needs to be tailored to your particular context. It might even be useful to ‘Action Research’ how you develop your PAR capacity. Don’t assume it will just happen.
Understanding the potential strengths and resources that can be mobilised for a PAR process is fundamental. A strengths perspective enables you to focus on the capacities and potentialities of your agency, your service users and your community of other stakeholders. ‘Listening to’ or ‘listening for’ the strengths in your community can motivate people to participate. It enables you to positively engage with your stakeholders and the unique contribution they can make to planning and action. Collaborative work will also need to acknowledge the constraints that are operating in any given context so you can work within these, or develop strategies in response to them. For further reading on this topic see Karen Healy’s essay entitled: Asset-based Community Development: Recognising and Building on Community Strengths in O’Hara, A and Weber, Z. (2006). See also Karen Healy’s chapter on ‘The Strengths Perspective’, in Social Work Theories in Context: Creating Frameworks for Practice (2005) and Dennis Saleebey’s The Strengths Perspective in Social Work Practice (2006).
4.1.1 Strengths and resources scans
An environmental scan enables you to identify the range of strengths and resources in your agency/service, in the network of services, and in your local community. It is these inherent strengths and resources of your context that need to be identified, engaged and developed. The following tool provides questions for you to consider when scanning for the strengths and resources of your agency (internal) and your community of stakeholders (external).
| The strengths and resources of our agency/service | Responses |
|---|---|
What is the structure of our agency? What are our strengths? What resources can we dedicate to initiating a PAR process? What parts of the agency need to be, or would benefit from being, involved in the PAR process? What PAR values are present in our agency, or the relevant part of the agency? (see Section 1) Are there already processes within our agency that reflect PAR values or processes? (See Section 3.6 on an Action Research system) How open or closed is our agency to include others, for example, clients and other agencies in service development planning and reflection? Should this include some groups more than others? What concerns or challenges exist in implementing PAR values and processes? Who is/should be responsible for ensuring PAR has endorsement, time and resources? What agency constraints will need to be acknowledged and managed? Are there any other relevant questions we as an agency need to address in order to undertake PAR? |
| The strengths and resources of our community | Responses |
|---|---|
How do the history, character and culture of our community/locality affect how we encourage involvement in a local early intervention strategy with a PAR component? What/who are the key ‘first to know’ agencies in our community? What relationships currently exist with these? What networking/collaborative mechanisms already exist that may be involved in a PAR initiative? Who is ‘on board’ already? Who isn’t? What other relationships with key stakeholders will be important to acknowledge and develop? What community strengths and resources could we mobilise? How will we build an inventory of community strengths? Who from other services and the community has or could quickly develop some understanding of PAR and its role in early intervention? What communication strategy could we develop to facilitate greater understanding of and engagement with a PAR process? What other relevant questions need to be addressed regarding the involvement of other services and the community? |
4.1.2 PAR skills audit
To undertake PAR you will need to assess what relevant skills you and those you are working in collaboration with already have, and what additional skills you will collectively need to undertake a PAR process. The Table on page 55 lists the key skills in human services delivery relevant to PAR. These include relationship building, communication, group work, community work, organisational coordination, research and so on. The audit tool is designed to assist you to acknowledge the skills you and others involved have, and note the gaps or areas that need development, specialist input or training. You can do this individually or as a group exercise, and it can also be used as a resource for identifying training needs.
Remember PAR is not about starting from scratch with a whole new set of values, skills and knowledge. Most services are used to translating their terms of reference, funding guidelines, theoretical frameworks and policies and procedures into ‘real world’ human service practice. It is your human service understandings, questions and competencies that will drive AR initiatives. In the 2007 – 2008 summary report Reconnect and NAYSS services identified that their ‘own knowledge and training were a barrier to successfully designing and running Action Research projects’. Training opportunities about the language and methods of PAR will improve your confidence and your capacity to plan, deliver and report on effective research (ARTD 2009, p.iii).
The following tool is designed to assist you to identify the skills needed for PAR, the current skills of those in your PAR project, any areas needing development or training, and those areas where additional assistance would be useful. Remember service users are also experts in their own lives and in the life of their community.
| Interpersonal and counselling skills | Related PAR skills | Our strengths - gaps – need to develop – need to seek specialist input – need for training - and so on |
|---|---|---|
| Group work skills | Related PAR skills | Our strengths - gaps – need to develop – need to seek specialist input – need for training - and so on |
| Community work skills | Related PAR skills | Our strengths - gaps – need to develop – need to seek specialist input – need for training - and so on |
| Organisational Skills | Related PAR skills | Our strengths - gaps – need to develop – need to seek specialist input – need for training - and so on |
| Research Skills | Related PAR skill | Our strengths - gaps – need to develop – need to seek specialist input – need for training - and so on |
| Relationship building | Ability to form trusting, credible and respectful relationships with your clients, the community and its organisations. | |
| Communication skills | Ability to engage with people and to invite people to express their thoughts, ideas and views. Ability to actively listen. Ability to create safe space and use plain language when communicating about your work and PAR. Ability to clearly explain PAR and how it could work in your context with your stakeholders. Ability to communicate a genuine wish to enable people’s access to a local PAR process and to give value to their contribution. | |
| Problem solving | Ability to identify and communicate that you value hearing and understanding what is working well and what is not working well. Ability to hear and give value to people’s concerns, ideas and hunches. Ability to cooperate and collaborate with people from diverse backgrounds and/or roles in order to develop Participatory Action Research questions. Ability to identify and mobilise resources – what is available and how to gain access to them. Ability to set goals within your agency and with your stakeholders and continually review your progress. Ability to manage emotional issues in crisis situations. | |
| Empathy | Ability to listen to and attend to people’s concerns in a way that promotes safety and people’s capacity to participate. Ability to genuinely respect diverse perspectives, values and cultures. Ability to look at things from the client’s or stakeholder’s frame of reference. | |
| Seeking understanding | Ability to step back and reflect on your assumptions and values. Ability to remain somewhat sceptical about what will ‘work’. Ability to value making time for non-chaotic reflection. Able to cope with an open and transparent process and a shared reporting of insights. | |
| Observation | Ability to observe and describe what happened without jumping to interpretation. | |
| Flexibility | Ability to take on new information, change direction and modify questions, plans and strategies along the way. Ability to juggle a number of projects/research questions at a time. | |
| Facilitation | Ability to support people to have their say in focus groups or meetings. Ability to manage the ‘high talkers’ to ensure everyone has an opportunity to speak and be heard. Ability to ensure a clear mechanism for facilitation is established with a reference group or other collaborative mechanisms. Ability to deal constructively with group disagreements and conflicts. Ability to debrief and support those who are ‘new’ to participation. Ability to ensure that transparency and a clear and agreed upon documentation/reporting method is accepted by members of group processes. | |
| Group development | Ability to provide support, resources and opportunities for groups to be established and sustained. For example, a parents’ group. | |
| Evaluation | Ability to assist groups to negotiate, understand and name outcomes (intended and unintended). | |
| Creativity | Ability to be open to having fun and being comfortable with different ways of doing things. | |
| Empowerment | Ability to take steps to allow the least powerful to be heard and have influence. | |
| Negotiation skills | Ability to communicate, problem solve and seek agreement when working with diverse groups, for example, protocols and referral policies. | |
| Networking | Ability to actively work ‘with’ other people/groups/services, rather than ‘flying solo’ and trying to solve all the problems on your own. Ability to facilitate connection between people and groups in your community. Ability to initiate activities and convene meetings to create opportunities for people to come together to work on achieving specific goals. | |
| Small ‘p’ political skills | Ability to use language and processes that make it easy to be involved. Ability to negotiate access to resources and systems. Ability to respect and understand protocols and customs, for example, cultural norms. Ability to identify key people - the ‘movers and shakers’ - and make the most of what they have to offer. Ability to support and reassure people who feel threatened by change. | |
| Resource auditing | Ability to identify community strengths and resources. Ability to identify the key community issues. Ability to identify the challenges and constraints. | |
| Community development and education | Ability to assist people from diverse backgrounds to become involved in building a community’s capacity for early intervention through PAR. | |
| Facilitation skills | Ability to work with diverse groups of people. Ability to assist people to generate their own ideas/solutions/meanings. | |
| Cross cultural competencies | Ability to listen to and work with people in ways that respect and incorporate their ‘cultures’. Ability to negotiate guidelines and facilitate communication between groups who may not use the same language and/or have different understandings of things. Ability to pay attention to what it will take for different communities to ‘own’ certain strategies/actions. | |
| Motivating | Ability to engage with and educate those involved. Ability to inspire enthusiasm and highlight ‘what’s in it’ for various stakeholders. Ability to recognise and celebrate the achievements and skills of all those involved. | |
| Planning | Ability to work through how things will be done in fairly systematic ways. | |
| Information sharing | Ability to communicate and share information – to all stakeholders across the community – for example by developing a clear workable communication strategy. | |
| Policy development | Ability to use PAR insights to inform policy and service directions. Ability to document key findings in a way that promotes engagement with policy makers regarding key learning, program insights, service improvements etc. Ability to break down broad policy questions into manageable research questions. Ability to keep focused on big picture program goals while coordinating micro levels of inquiry. | |
| Time management | Ability to employ strategies to make effective use of time. For example allocating specific time for activity related to your PAR initiative. | |
| Conflict resolution | Ability to assess for and diffuse tensions across a broad range of groups. There may be times when you assess that a specialist facilitator is required to assist a working group or individuals who are unable to proceed due to conflict. Ability to creatively use conflict for learning. | |
| Team management | Ability to motivate and support the work of teams. Ability to ensure workloads/roles/tasks are realistic and appropriate for particular people or work groups. | |
| Monitoring | Ability to maintain the ‘quality’ of the PAR processes. Ability to assess the thoroughness/validity of what is happening. | |
| Marketing | Ability to communicate about the good practice and positive early intervention outcomes of community-based collaborations. For example, in succinct summary reports of a local strategy and its achievements. | |
| Report writing | Ability to report clearly in writing using plain language and providing an open and honest account of work undertaken, agency data, proposed projects etc. | |
Preparation for PAR (Traditional research often commences with a literature review) | Ability to undertake preliminary research to scope what has previously been done and learnt in relation to your issue or question. Do your homework - understand, critique and consider previous insights. | |
| Developing research questions | Ability to turn local issues/concerns/hunches into Action Research questions. Ability to engage stakeholders in conversation about observations, issues and critical questions. | |
| Deciding how to go about the research (often called the methodology) | Ability to work out the best way to gather and make sense of the information you need. Ability to cooperate with other stakeholders in relation to who, how, what, where, when and why research activity will occur. | |
| Ethical practice | Ability to understand and ensure the rights of all participants are respected throughout the process. Ability to interpret the relevant ethical codes and guidelines and apply these to the PAR project. Ability to ensure a transparent research process that respects all participants and seeks their consent if documentation material intends to name or include information and other inputs from participants. | |
| Documenting | Ability to set up a simple and efficient system for documenting the details of the process and the evidence you depend on. | |
| Data management | Ability to manage information and data effectively. This will involve working out the best time and physical or computer-based methods of managing your PAR information. | |
| Theory building | Ability to work out why things happened in partnership with others. | |
| Publicising/ publishing | Ability to share insights and findings publicly and in a way that allows for their evaluation. Ability to package the PAR story into a resource that can be shared (report, video, performance, newsletter etc.). |
4.2 Checklist for starting PAR
This checklist is designed for you to use very early in the PAR process. If you use it later you should include rows for things such as ‘Who are the stakeholders?’ etc.
| Key consideration | Existing strengths and opportunities | What else might be useful to do? |
|---|---|---|
| Agency-Management support for PAR | ||
| Agency-Management understanding of PAR | ||
| Specific endorsement to undertake PAR | ||
| Making time for PAR | ||
| Mechanisms for managing PAR | ||
| Internal agency scan | ||
| Community scan | ||
| PAR skills audit | ||
| Support, supervision and sounding boards | ||
| General ethical considerations | ||
| Anything else? |
4.3 Participatory strategies for ‘finding out’
PAR requires genuine participation and collaboration – allowing others to ask questions, to gather and interpret data, and for mistakes – or poor outcomes – to be seen as sources of learning rather than as risks to be avoided. Unfortunately funding arrangements can position some agencies as competitors rather than potential collaborators. PAR provides a means to work against the forces that undermine cooperation. The participation of key stakeholders is critical in PAR. Participation enables a comprehensive consideration of the big questions through smaller more targeted inquiries. Participation promotes understanding of different roles and responsibilities, the overlaps and gaps in service delivery and the different ways of making meaning and responding to issues and concerns. Participation promotes real collaboration, resource and information sharing, community links and networks and a greater capacity to respond holistically to critical social problems in vulnerable families and communities.
Key Stakeholders: Who could potentially be involved?
- Front-line early intervention workers
- Client individuals, groups and communities eg young people and their families
- Agency management
- Other service providers
- Larger local institutions - local schools, TAFE, universities
- Local government, and local offices of other levels of government
- Local community groups
- Local businesses
All stakeholders will be informants in your PAR process. Their views and opinions will influence the focus and course of the research activity. They can be engaged to participate in the variety of ways outlined below.
The challenge of meaningfully involving those most affected by a situation can be substantial. When the goal of early intervention relates to experiences such as homelessness or mental health, the individuals, groups and communities who are the users of services are usually and understandably more interested in timely and relevant responses rather than involvement in committees and bureaucratic processes. A challenge in running a PAR process is to invite and engage those ‘most affected’ to provide direction in what is explored and what interpretations are made. You will need to be quite creative in developing a mix of processes that are meaningful and inclusive for the diversity of stakeholders you have.
The discussion of how to achieve these conditions of mutual involvement, participation and collaboration are very similar to the discussions about how to achieve ‘community development’. For example, the more disempowered you are, the less hope you may have about either the value of participating or even the chances of something good coming out of it.
Wadsworth 1998, p.11
Informal conversations are one of the best ways to get people’s opinions and ideas. For example:
What could we do to …?
Do you have any thoughts on …?
What have you found useful for …?
Brainstorming is a much used group technique to generate a range of ideas and views through free association, though it can be a challenge to maintain the agreement that all suggestions are welcomed without critical comment (Wadsworth 1997, p.81). To boost the number of people who feel confident to contribute it can be useful to firstly brainstorm in smaller groups and bring back the ideas to the larger group.
When used to try to generate creative and imaginative new solutions, the results of brainstorming could be listed for further thought and discussion rather than expected or relied on to come up with the best solutions immediately. Sometimes it is helpful for people to go away and chew over all the possibilities, once they have been ‘put on the table’ by a group, and come back later.
Wadsworth 1997, p.81
A reference group can be established for a particular question or for your PAR more generally. Reference groups seek people’s views and feedback in a clearly invited and structured way. They enable the gathering of a broad range of views if composed of people from number of sectors/parts of the community. In one service, a reference group was composed of young people, parents, school personnel, the agency, police and other local community stakeholders who could provide valuable feedback, broad views and problem solving in relation to defining the PAR question and guiding the action plan.
An initial step was developing a reference group. This group consisted of 22 individuals, representing agencies in the provision of services to young people in the central Sydney area. Reference group members generated several potential Action Research questions.
Service provider
See Rice (2002) for tips on ‘reference groups that really work’.
Focus groups can provide feedback on particular issues or topics. They are good at capturing the views of a particular group or sub-population (such as a focus group of young people excluded from school), and for ‘drilling down’ into a particular topic (such as how a local service system might work more effectively). Focus groups encourage the exploration and sharing of people’s feelings, ideas, aspirations, reservations, and hunches. They can be organised in ways and take place in spaces that are culturally responsive and accessible for those involved.
Focus groups generally require strong sensitive facilitation and an atmosphere of respect and safety to enable participants to trust and engage with the process. See Dick (2003) for a very useful outline of how to facilitate a focus group that is structured but where the information provided is driven by the participants.
Co-researchers are those that work alongside you in the PAR process. They work ‘beside’ you developing processes, implementing strategies, interpreting data and evaluating change. Co-researcher groups can undertake part or all of the PAR for one or more questions. Co-research groups can also provide creative and innovative reporting via arts mediums such as video production, written stories and so on. Co-research groups tend to have diverse stakeholder membership, including service providers, clients where appropriate, and other relevant stakeholders.
Peer research by young people can take a number of forms. ‘Peer interviewers’ can be loosely defined as individuals with a connection to a specific target group with whom they share language and culture. Peer interviewers enable young people’s voices to be heard when otherwise they may be inaccessible. Peer interviewers can play a key role in a PAR process and they should be recognised accordingly.
A group of young people was set up to explore the question ‘what would it take for young people to feel safe about accessing [the service] for support?’ As part of a planning process, the young people coordinated their classmates’ answers to questionnaires and interviews, and completed the observation and reflection phases.
Their views and suggestions were used as the basis for further planning. The co-research group also produced a video for local schools that covered some of the issues raised in their inquiry processes.
Youth Homelessness Pilot Program service
As part of a planning process peer interviewers can enable their peers to answer questionnaires and be interviewed for their views and opinions in both the observation and reflection phases and the action implementation phase. Peer interviewers can provide rich information about youth issues, barriers to access, support needs, trust and privacy, attitudes and fears to specific issues or institutions and so on. An adult inquiry may not achieve the depth of feedback, especially if there is any anger, distrust or alienation being experienced by young people.
Peer interviewers were used at a local youth forum to determine what people were getting out of the forum, what they thought the benefits were, what they knew at the end compared to what they knew in the beginning & what their favourite things were.
Because it was young people asking the questions, the responses were more frank than they might have been with workers. Peer interviewers had to attend training each week for 6 weeks before the forum. Everyone was committed to the process, however some people were a bit shy and did less than others did. Peer interviewers helped each other out if they were feeling shame. Having training was sooooo important to making it work & building up the confidence needed to get out there & ask everyone how it was.
Manager, Anglicare Topend
Peer involvement can also be in other roles than that of ‘interviewer’. For example, in 2007 the Colony 47 NAYSS partnered with Relationships Australia to run a forum for African families in Hobart. They employed a young person to enhance the participation and feedback of other young people. The forum was called Strengthening Families in a New Country.
Two hundred people attended the one day Forum which included presentations by the Commissioner for Children, Anti-Discrimination Commissioner, Police and other relevant service info and also break out groups for participants to talk through issues.
For the Forum, Colony 47 NAYSS worked with a group of young African Australians from a local college to present on their insights, perspectives and experiences of settlement called “UNITY UNITED”. The workshop sessions, presentation and individual interviews with the young participants were videoed and edited into a documentary, UNITY UNITED. We employed a young person from the client group, to co-coordinate this project with a NAYSS worker. The young person was responsible for:
- Encouraging interest and support from peers
- Ensuring material and resources were age and culturally responsive
- Ensuring all material and resources authentically reflected the views and experiences of peers.
This approach provided skills and experience for the young person and immeasurable benefits for the authenticity and relevance of the project for the client group.
Colony 47
Although sometimes similar to a co-research group, peer research is about those who are part of the target group playing a role in the PAR inquiry process. Peer research has particular utility in gaining information from ‘hidden populations’ but should not be limited to this.
A community development approach can support and empower people to take greater control of and responsibility for their situation. The role of a PAR facilitator is to focus people’s attention on the questions, problems and issues that arise and harness their strengths and capacities to create solutions. A community development approach involves effective consultation with all key stakeholders to ensure authenticity, agreed understandings and relevance to everyone’s unique lives, roles, perspectives and concerns. Effective consultation should enable participants to express their views in their own language. A thorough community development approach takes the time to build relationships, understand the different ideas and understandings about a particular question, and works to ensure there is some agreement about the direction of the inquiry. This requires careful work to ensure all those consulted – from decision makers, to clients, to community members – are recognised and empowered in the process. Creating structures (e.g. reference groups or regular project meetings) is important to ensure there is rich communication, acknowledgement, and a mechanism for flexible planning, implementation, feedback, discussion of findings, recommendations and the sharing of learning.
Most of the strategies mentioned above can include most stakeholders – e.g. informal conversation, reference group membership, being involved in a focus group. The following table lists a range of other participation strategies that can be utilised with different stakeholder groups.
| Who are the stakeholders? | Possible strategies |
|---|---|
| Agency management | Board meeting, staff meetings, strategic planning events, service evaluations, PAR training, informal discussion. |
| Your supervisor/ team leader | Supervision sessions, PAR training, critical incident debriefing. |
| Your clients | PAR training, peer audits of your service, peer interviewing, being interviewed by a peer interviewer, peer facilitation of groups/events, ‘panels of experts’ session (where they act in a ‘Brains Trust’ role), videoing what happens and feedback, video editing, ‘graffiti’ walls, community cultural development processes. |
| Other community service providers | Inter-agency meetings, seminars and forums, training events, special meetings, community consultations, informal networks/working relationships. |
| Local businesses | Attending a meeting of the local Chamber of Commerce/ business associations, phone calls, inviting to an agency event e.g. reference group meeting (if not a member), a Board meeting, AGM, a fundraiser, community consultations. |
| Members of the broader community | Newsletter and newspaper invitations, open forums, service open days, community consultations. |
| Other like services in other localities | Across program network mechanisms, invitations to provide input, reports, training events, informal networks/working relationships, feedback. |
4.4 OTHER STRATEGIES FOR ‘FINDING OUT’
There are a wide range of other methods that can be used as ways of generating insights, preferences and rankings of ideas from individuals or groups. A number of these are briefly described in Stringer (2007) and Wadsworth (1997).
- Informal interviews (referred to by Stringer 2007, p.69) as ‘guided reflection’
- Drawing maps and plotting key features (individual or group based)
- A guided tour
- Surveys (more useful in the later stages of a PAR process to include input from a wider range of people)
- Open Space Technology (this has been used in Reconnect and NAYSS at Good Practice Forums)
- Quality Circles
- Search Conference techniques
- Narrative and story telling
- Concept mapping
- Fishbowls
- Force-field analysis
4.5 ANALYSING: STRATEGIES FOR REFLECTING ON WHAT YOU HAVE FOUND
Analysis is the process of distilling large quantities of information to uncover significant features and elements that are embedded …
Stringer 2007, p.95
In a participatory context such as PAR the meaning you make of your data will be negotiated – in other words, it will be what you agree it to be. That does not mean you should not make every effort to make the interpretations trustworthy. To maximise this you should use strategies for interpreting and analysing that suspend your ‘judgement’ and try to identify the story your information tells.
Stringer (2007, p.98-106) talks of two main processes for ‘distilling’ the information you have gathered. These are:
- Categorizing and coding, and
- Analysing key experiences.
These are briefly summarised below.
4.5.1 Categorising and coding
Categorising is about identifying a clear representation of the information (data) you have collected, by looking for common themes. A code is the name you give a particular category and is used as a tool for sorting through and organising the information (data) you have collected. You have to ‘suspend’ you own interpretations whilst you do this (as much as is possible anyway). To help in this use the verbatim principle as much as you can. This means using the words and concepts of the participants. Stringer (2007) suggests the following:
- Keeping different stakeholders themes separate at least at the beginning. This means they can ‘check’ your interpretations when you ‘share’ these back to them (if you didn’t do it together).
- Procedures involve:
- Reviewing the collected information within a stakeholder group or event
- Identifying the discrete ideas in the various contributions i.e. break it into its bits. For example, what ideas, activities, events, topics were raised in a particular focus group or information interview? This is called ‘unitizing the data’. You can use post-it notes or cards or other visual ways to code when doing this.
- Categorising and coding. Now you can cluster these single ideas into groups and give the cluster a name (called a code). Depending on the codes you use, you end up with lots of piles or only a few. Debates will rage about whether two piles are the same, related or different.
- Then you can look across stakeholders or across events and look for common themes. You might find different stakeholders have some different concerns or ways of seeing things, and that there are also some common themes or concerns across groups.
- You can then develop a way to describe what you have found.
4.5.2 Analysing key experiences
This type of analysis focuses on events that seem to have had (or you wonder if these have had) a significant impact on the experience of stakeholders. You can use this approach to explore what service users or stakeholders have experienced of a new strategy you want to evaluate.
By ‘unpacking’ these events we can learn the features of that experience that make them so meaningful, and in the process we extend our understanding of the way the issues affect their lives.
Stringer 2007, p.103
The steps suggested for this include:
- Identify key events/experiences
- Identify main features of each event/experience
- Identify the elements that compose the event/experience
- Identify themes.
This type of analysis can be used to help you analyse what people have said about key events, experiences or interventions in focus groups, workshops or interviews.
4.5.3 Displaying what you have found
You can do this via a range of strategies, including:
- Descriptive accounts
- Representative stories
- Themes
- Audio and/or visual presentations
- Statistics, and
- Tables and graphs.
For further reading check out Stringer (2007) Action Research, Chapter 5 titled ‘Think: Interpreting and Analysing’.
4.6 Templates for recording your PAR
Recording your PAR (sometimes called ‘documenting’) is a key challenge and there is no single way to do this. You will need to develop and adapt the way you record information to suit your individual situations and preferences. Generally you will need to use more than one recording strategy. Some of your recording tools may be structured and others quite flexible.
Different recording tools may be useful for planning, recording what happens, and reflection. Some assist you to capture lots of information (butchers paper notes from a workshop) while others act as ‘summary sheets’. These summaries document your main research activities and indicate where more detailed information is stored e.g. in the Reference Group minutes.
The following tools have been developed to assist you to record what happens, the processes and the insights. They are simple and practical and intended to assist in sorting information or developing key points. Various computer programs can also be used to record and sort information - for example, to identify the key themes from comments lodged in a feedback box.
These tools and your records are not an end in themselves. The objective is not about developing impressive piles of paper about what is happening. The real objective is to improve the outcomes for those you are trying to assist and develop practices that can contribute to this. The PAR tools in this kit are to help you and your community achieve this objective.
Feel free to mix and adapt those that seem to meet your particular needs. Or make up something that suits you better.
A visual template for summarising PAR
Recording example 2: A two-step planning proforma
(adapted from a template originally contributed by RAFT Wollongong to The Reconnect Action Research Kit)
TITLE OF OUR PAR PROJECT:
| Questions to ask | Prompts | Our PAR |
|---|---|---|
What area or broad theme do we want to look at? What is known about this already? | Do our homework by seeing what others have done and what others (including stakeholders) say. | |
| What is our question/s? | Macro or micro level? For example, ‘What would it take...?’ or ‘What could we do...?’ | |
| How is this linked to better outcomes for the people affected? | What are we seeking to change or explore and how does this link to better outcomes for those we are seeking to assist? | |
| Who should we involve in our PAR? | Seek stakeholders/ participants/those affected and list them here. | |
| What range of strategies might we first try? | What are the ideas brainstormed by participants? | |
| Of these what are our preferred strategies? | Negotiate and ‘prioritise’ strategies, taking into account ethical, strategic and resource considerations. | |
| Who needs to do what? | Indicate tasks, roles and issues to be considered by various people & agencies. | |
| What is our time line? | Put the actions in a timetable. | |
| What have we learnt so far? | List any observations, insights, issues or questions that have arisen throughout this planning process. |
| Questions to ask | Prompts | Our plan |
|---|---|---|
| What are we going to try? | Discuss the specific strategy you wish to try out in response to your PAR question | |
| Who is involved? | List the various people who are involved with carrying out and recording the strategy | |
| What is to be done by whom? | Map out and delegate tasks | |
| What ethical considerations exist and how will these be dealt with? | Map out issues and indicate how these will be safeguarded | |
| What timelines? | When are things to be done by? When will we meet to discuss? | |
| What will we record and how? | What methods will we use to record (observations), and who will do this? |
| PAR summary sheet 1 | Summary | Implications for where to from here |
|---|---|---|
| PAR summary sheet 2 | Summary | Observations, evidence, insights, new questions and issues |
| Theme or issue of interest | ||
Observe What is known about this already? What else might be useful to find out? Who else to ask? How will we go about this? | ||
Reflect How do we interpret the information we have gathered? What could we change to produce better outcomes for our clients? | ||
| Macro research question | ||
| Micro questions | ||
Plan What , Who, When | ||
Act The story | ||
Observe What happened, For different participants/ parties, What was recorded | ||
| Reflect (analyse) | ||
Share (and review, publish) Who, What, When, Where, How |