Holistic Community Assessment
Measuring Holistic Development Using an Immersive Story-Capture Approach Opportunity International, Dr. Genzo Yamamoto, Dr. Peter Clark, Abigail Condie The Problem: Losing Participant Voice
Interviews and Story Scoring
No way to measure intangible well-being.
A valuable opportunity to connect.
Numerous research tools exist to measure tangible aspects of well-being (e.g., physical, financial, health), but few approaches exist to broadly assess the more intangible aspects of well-being, despite recent scholarship highlighting the importance of these factors.
The Holistic Community Assessment (HCA) is a simple research approach that can be easily implemented by any research team, even with staff who have little to no prior research experience. HCA offers organizational staff a valuable opportunity to connect with the people they serve on a meaningful level.
Standard methods limit participant voice. While there are certainly instances where quantitative approaches are both useful and necessary, when narrow questions are shaped by the researcher, we lose people’s distinct perspectives and can miss valuable insights. Quantitative approaches also typically require more questions and larger sample sizes than qualitative approaches, resulting in costly studies.
Our Approach: Mini Story Capture Leveraging recent research on values and well-being. Recent scholarship has pinpointed concepts such as trust,1 human agency,2 and hope.3 These have long been recognized as important components of the Judeo-Christian concept of shalom, which denotes a rich, holistic concept of humans thriving in all relationships: with God, with self, with fellows, and with nature.4 Capturing five mini-stories. Our team developed a rich, qualitative assessment approach that is simple and affordable, based on listening to and scoring people’s “mini-stories” captured uniquely to understand different shalom dimensions. Such an approach captures unique findings and connections that would not have been easily captured with more quantitative approaches. Allowing for local contextualization. The questions and scoring rubrics have purposefully been designed for research teams to interpret the results within their own context. The methodology has been tested in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
Scoring across three categories. After researchers listen to the stories of individuals in a community, they reflect on each story and assign it a score between -5 and +5 in each of the following three categories: 1. Context What situation or circumstances are described? 2. Internal What are the feelings and value responses of the respondent? 3. Action What action(s) did the respondent take?
Insights from Innovative Mini Story-Capture Analysis Careful story analysis informs a deep understanding of individuals, families, and their broader communities. This section provides a sampling of insights drawn from across numerous countries.
Mini-Story Thematic Analysis
Geographic Score Mapping
Stories captured provide rich insights into the particular issues or topics on the hearts and minds of the study participants.
Separating scores by location allows for identification of scoring trends. For example, here we see consistently lower “relationship with community” scores in urban areas with a sample primarily consisting of internally displaced peoples, compared to rural areas (even those in post-conflict zones).
Sanitation and hygiene issues
“Our community is in bad shape now because of very poor sanitation. At first the City Council were cleaning the location, encouraging people to have and use the latrines. But it’s a different story now. People are littering anywhere and very few people use toilets now. The City Council are no longer doing the cleaning. Adding on that I have noted that most of the youth are drinking beer heavily. The market is loaded with this cheap beer called Madoli, and our boys have gone crazy with the drinking habit. To make matters worse some of them are dying because they drink with an empty stomach. Our children are leaders of tomorrow and this cheap beer is killing our future leaders.”
Dissatisfaction with local leadership
Mini-Story Scores by Region, Colombia (N=120)
Alcoholism among youth
Identifying Main Characters
Fear for future generations
We pinpoint the individuals and institutions that play an important role in respondents’ lives. Environment Theory of Change, Colombia
Building Participants’ Theories of Change By analyzing participant scores across multiple mini-stories, we can gain a sense of the most pressing challenges they have identified in their community, the solutions they would like to see implemented or have seen implemented successfully, and the end goals they have in mind for their community.
Relationship with God/ Allah seen as a constant, does not require significant action
Mini-Story Scores, Ghana (N=16) Weakest expressed values/ beliefs in relation to community and environment
Understanding Connections
While telling their stories, respondents often share the positive or negative factors that contribute to their relationships in each domain. In this example, we see the factors contributing to negative family scores in Colombia.
Context Internal
Challenging circumstances in community, environment, family
Poor Communication
17%
Lack of Tolerance
13%
Poor Decisions
13%
Problems with Children
13%
Violence and Alcohol
13%
Action
Belief that the government should be the one making improvements to their physical surroundings
Qualitative Modeling of Mini-Story Scores Quasi-quantitative scoring of stories can be useful, particularly when paired with insights from the mini-stories.
For more information on the Holistic Community Assessment approach, visit www.opportunity.org/holistic-assessment or contact us at knowledgemanagement@opportunity.org 1Sen, A. On Ethics and Economics (1987). 2Elder, G. H. “Time, human agency, and social change: Perspectives on the life course.” Social Psychology Quarterly, 57 (1), 4–15 (1994). 3Lybbert, T. and Wydick, B. “Hope as Aspirations, Agency, and Pathways.” The Economics of Poverty Traps (2019). 4Wolterstorff, N. Until Justice and Peace Embrace (1983).
Negative Factors for Family Story, Colombia
Infidelity
12%
Problems with Money
12%