On the last day we started to dive a bit deeper into the analysis of the outcomes and sense-making we started on Thursday afternoon.
Sense-making
Frank mentioned the previous day that he started to feel like he could see some
patterns and connections in the data, so we started off by sharing any insights
we had so far. We were careful to explain that these are just initial insights,
as we have only been to one village and hope to collect more data from other
villages and actors. However, it is helpful to do analysis iteratively, so see
what patterns are emerging in the data and might be worth exploring further,
and what gaps present themselves in the data (these might be gaps, or a lack of
outcomes).
We continued by doing some simple categorisation by actor:
- Pastors (10)
- Community people (13) - of which 5 were about elderly, and 4 about women
- NGO (5)
- Choir leaders (3)
- Churches (3) (church members acting together)
- Sunday school teachers (1)
- literacy teachers (1)
- Pre-school teachers
We noticed that there were no outcomes about Bible
colleges/students, village leaders, diaspora or other supporters.
We then categorised the outcomes by their relationship to
the SE “theory of change” that we
presented on Monday, and had further discussion about the implications for the
team.
In the afternoon we spent time thinking about how to more forward with the OH research. We first thought about what people we might specifically want to meet - based on “holes” we had seen in the data. We also decided on the additional villages the team wanted to visit, and any specific outcomes we wanted to follow up on.
We reviewed our field methods, and the team felt that individual interviews would be better than the group approach, but that they still wanted to combine this with the ministry.
We also discussed the value of creating a framework of desired behavioural changes which could be a support to the interviews - helping the team members to remember what kinds of behaviour we might be interested in. We decided that we would look into an ‘outcome mapping’ style progress marker framework, which would give some broad categories of behaviour for the various actors we were most interested in. However, we would need to be careful to still look for behaviours outside of this framework.
One of the observations that stood out from the team was
that while they were happy for the outcomes they had found, they still had
hoped to find out more in depth about how people’s thinking was changing. For
example, pastors were using scripture, but at what level? How has the Malila
scripture helped people to understand scripture in more depth? We agreed that
this would be hard to “observe”, but that:
- Real changes in thinking/attitudes should result in observable behaviour which we can capture (e.g. a deeper understanding of forgiveness, should result in more forgiving behaviour)
- We could also ‘bend the rules’ of Outcome Harvesting and record where people have expressed that they have changed their thinking. This might need to be proactively sought out in the interviews, so we would need to inquire about changes in thinking and behaviour.
We finally reviewed how the outcomes would be reviewed and entered into the database, and how they would work with sense making.
At the end of the day, we spent a short time in reflection
about the week, and what questions were remaining:
- How can we do sense making together with the NGO (this was considered an important aspect of how to move forward)
- One of the team expressed how evaluating his own work and thinking about the fruit helps to think about how to improve the work and what he does.
- Another team member felt like they had only being doing little things in SE, but now seeing the fruit together has helped him see the bigger picture.
- That through the evaluation we are able to see where to work more, and how to improve. See where there is a need.
- The actor mapping helps to recognise who the different actors are and the unique roles they play.
Author: Phil Smith
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