The Backstory
Creative Community Engagement
Dr Marisa de Andrade
Walking the streets of disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Glasgow and using radio, theatre, singing and music to connect with diverse communities, I was trying to understand what it means to be ‘well’. How do different communities experience health? What stops some community members from accessing services? And what changes will ultimately lead to improvements in health and wellbeing for marginalised communities thereby reducing widening inequalities? These are some of the big questions that have been swirling in my head since 2013 when I first entered ‘the field’ for the project that would become Measuring Humanity.
The more I connected through creative community engagement, the more it seemed I got closer to accessing community members’ ‘truths’. The closer I got to understanding how lived experiences relate to health and wellbeing. The challenge was how to systematically capture these ‘softer’ outcomes against the more tangible ‘harder’ performance measures and targets saturating the health policy and practice landscape? How to develop and pilot a framework to evaluate and justify this type of work as this is what I was funded by NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde to do?
Mechanisms for Data Capture
I was to come up with a mechanism to capture data obtained through creative community engagement, asset-based working and co-production in a ‘meaningful and measurable’ way in order to monitor and evaluate asset-based approaches and applications in a way that links to organisational targets, outcomes and policies. And so the first step was to conceptualise an asset-based indicator framework (ABIF)–more below– and apply it with so called ‘hard-to-reach’ communities.
But the process threw up more questions and so Measuring Humanity was born supported by an ESRC Impact Accelerator Grant. A space for us push the boundaries of our critical thinking when it comes to evidence, targets and outcomes in health policy and practice. We reflected on our own ABIF concept which prompted questions as to whether measuring and applying metrics helped or impeded health system improvements and equality? Why are we obsessed with performance measurement and what are the unintended consequences? An opportunity to collectively change the way health and inequalities in community settings is understood and ‘measured’. A place to ‘validate the feels’. A chance to inform local, national and international policies on equality, community empowerment, poverty and sustainability from the bottom-up. A way to use these upstream approaches to challenge systemic issues and structural causes of inequalities.
Asset-Based Indicator Framework: Origins
Throughout the site, you will spot the term ‘ABIF’ mentioned quite often. The Asset-Based Indicator Framework was the root of our early thinking back when Measuring Humanity was still in its infancy. It offered a mechanism for capturing changes in health and wellbeing when asset-based approaches were applied. When co-produced with a marginalised community, it helped us understand the reasons underpinning inequality for that particular community (at individual, community and structural levels). It also helped us identify the outcomes community members want to achieve to improve their health and change their circumstances.
If you’re a community-based practitioner, you may already be very familiar with asset-based approaches and guidance offered on how to ‘do’ or ‘evaluate’ them. You’ll also know how tricky this is to implement in the ‘real world’. There are barriers aplenty; most of them linked to a ‘lack of’ something – capacity, resources, time, trust to name but a few. Since our ABIF days, our thinking has evolved, and now we are surfing post-qualitative shores. That being said, ABIF has been very beneficial in shaping our early thinking–we implemented it to explore how using a co-produced methodological and conceptual framework could help to measure impacts of community engagement approaches on health and inequalities developed with the Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership, black minority ethnic (BME) communities and third sector.
POLICY
LOCAL
NATIONAL
INTERNATIONAL
EVALUATION
PROCESS
QUALITY OF LIFE
CHANGE
INDICATORS
INDIVIDUAL
COMMUNITY
STRUCTURAL
PROCESS
WHO?
WHY?
WHAT?
HOW?
Context
HOW DOES CONTEXT INFLUENCE THE ENGAGEMENT?
What is the social, cultural and political context in which the engagement is happening?
How might the context of the engagement have an impact on the development of trust between you and the community?
How can trust be built in the specific context?
WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF EACH INDICATOR IN RELATION TO THE CONTEXT
IN WHICH THE ENGAGEMENT IS TAKING PLACE?
HOW DOES CONTEXT INFLUENCE THE FORMATION OF OUTCOMES?
What are the contextual factors that determine the outcomes? Community? Policy? Environment? Other?
The first level of ABIF application is called PROCESS.
It is intended to happen before the actual engagement with the community
The Process consists of four main steps:
PROCESS
Who?
Why?
What?
How?
Who... are you engaging with?
IDENTIFY THE COMMUNITY THAT YOU ARE WORKING WITH
What are the defining characteristics of the community?
Ethnicity? Gender? Organisation? Issues? Age? Education? Geographic? Other?
DETERMINE WHETHER OTHER PARTNERS SHOULD BE INVOLVED
WHO ARE YOU?
What is your professional role? What is your organisations vision, culture, aims and strategies?
Are your individual aims aligned with those of your organisation?
PROCESS
Why... are you engaging with this community?
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO ACHIEVE FROM THIS ENGAGEMENT?
In the short, medium and long-term? What would you like to know? What would you like to change?
What is the relevance of engaging now? Does the community want to engage for the same reasons as you?
IS THERE A REASON WHY YOU ARE ENGAGING WITH THIS COMMUNITY NOW?
PROCESS
What... are you going to do?
HOW ARE YOU GOING TO ENGAGE?
Creative approaches – music, theatre, singing, art, food, sport, media?
Participatory action research? Community asset mapping? Other?
WHICH IS THE MOST APPROPRIATE ENGAGEMENT METHOD FOR THIS COMMUNITY?
WHO ARE YOU?
What is your professional role? What is your organisations vision, culture, aims and strategies?
Are your individual aims aligned with those of your organisation?
PROCESS
How... are you capturing data?
HOW ARE YOU GOING TO CAPTURE AND RECORD DATA SYSTEMATICALLY?
What is the most appropriate way of collecting data from the community you are engaging with?
Pictures? Reflective diaries? Questionnaires? Semi-structured interviews? Video? Audio? Drawing? Other?
IS DATA RECORDED TOGETHER WITH COMMUNITY MEMBERS?
What are the challenges related to the recording practice?
HOW OFTEN ARE YOU GOING TO ENGAGE?
A single event? Weekly? Quarterly? Monthly? Other?
HAVE YOU CONSIDERED ANY ETHICAL ISSUES? ARE THERE RISKS TO THE COMMUNITY?
How are you going to store the information safely? Has the data been anonymised?
How are you going to store the information safely? Has the data been anonymised?
Have you provided an information sheet with the reason of engagement and a consent form?
PROCESS
The second level of the application is to define the INDICATORS
important to the community.
These thirteen indicators should serve as a starting point for your engagement,
Identifying what indicators are important to the community will allow us to capture
changes the communities want to see.
Ideally indicators should be determined at the start of a community engagement
(captured at baseline to determine how things are for a community
at the start of the process), throughout the engagement process
and at the ‘end’ of a co-produced initiative (if there is one).
INDICATORS
Use the following 13 indicators
as a starting point
How do community members ’understand’ and ‘define’ each of these indicators? Are they all relevant to the community?
If not, which indicators are important to the community?
To understand more about the change process, look into the relationship between the indicators.
It will also be interesting to see how community members understand each indicator
at an individual, community and structural level.
INDICATORS
Outcomes
HAVE YOU CONSIDERED CAPTURING PROCESS, CHANGE AND QUALITY OF LIFE OUTCOMES?
Process outcomes are related to community’s experiences of using a service.
Change outcomes refer to the improvements that community members are seeking.
Quality of life outcomes include features of a person’s whole life that they are working towards achieving or maintaining
in partnership with services and other forms of support.
HAVE YOU CONSIDERED CAPTURING SHORT, MEDIUM AND LONG-TERM OUTCOMES?
WHAT IS THE ENDPOINT THAT YOU WANT TO REACH THROUGH THE ENGAGEMENT?
Consider what activities and processes would be required to achieve it.
HOW DOES YOUR ENGAGEMENT WORK?
What is the process by which change comes for this particular community?
EVALUATION
EVALUATION
Questionnaires with feeling scales
Time-use diaries
Reflective diaries
Questionnaires
Semi-structured interviews
Framework for the evaluation of spirituality
The Basic Needs Satisfaction
in General Scale (BNSG-S)
Self-determination Scale (SDS)
Self-rated health measures
Observation
Creative activities
Converstations
Semi-structured interviews
Relationship mapping
Weekly diaries
Observation of group dynamics
Helping Attitudes Scale
Self-reported questionnaires
Behavioural tools EEG, EMG
Ethnographic observation
Interviews
Drawings or photographs of environment
Policy
LINK OUTCOMES TO LOCAL, NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL POLICIES OR ACTION PLANS
Project Videos
Measuring Humanity: The Pilot
Measuring Humanity in Action
Participatory-action research…
How to apply the ABIF
Why are you here?
Are you:
Do you believe that creative community engagement ‘works’, but don’t know how to ‘prove’ this? Believe you have ‘evidence’ to ‘prove’ that creative community engagement works, but what you know, feel, experience, capture or report to your managers, funders, boards, policymakers or others doesn’t count as ‘evidence’?
Do you feel that health is linked to human connectivity and solidarity in some way, but don’t know how make this sound ‘scientific’ enough to be taken seriously? Do you need to ‘measure’ intangible things like trust, relationships or empathy (‘soft’ attributes that are actually quite ‘hard’ to make sense of) and vary (what’s happiness to me, isn’t happiness to you)? Do you want to change the way things are?
