Evaluating PB - By Ruth Jackson
Along with e-PB, evaluation seems to be the topic du jour of PB. And more importantly, unlike e-PB, evaluation is something that is discussed as much by practitioners as by ‘experts’. How do you go about evaluating PB meaningfully in a way that actually represents and analyses what is actually happening rather than whatever data is to hand or a handful of anecdotes after an event? With ever diminishing resources of all kinds.
I most definitely do not have the answers to that, but I am working on a project with the International Centre for Participation Studies and CFE to try and find some answers. I must just point out – we’re not doing evaluation ourselves, we’re researching it to find out the most useful ways for projects to evaluate themselves. We’re not involved (except on the margins) with the SQW/CLG evaluation and this project is different from that.
We interviewed a number of stakeholders at four different projects over the summer and sent out a questionnaire version of the interview questions to the other projects that we could find contact details for. We got quite a good response rate to that – 20 out of about 60, which is about a 33% response rate, during the summer when everyone is away. Which just goes to show the relevance of the subject. Then we took the information we’d gathered from the interviews and questionnaires to a workshop with some other non-practitioner (with the exception of Bill) interested PB stakeholders. These included consultants involved in evaluating regeneration activities, academics, third sector people involved in participatory evaluation and think tank people.
We had a very lively and engaged debate with them around five key questions we had coming out of the interviews and questionnaires.
From all of that we plan to develop some tools but we realise that one set of tools probably won’t fit all, especially given the level of innovation and diversity currently happening in the UK PB projects. So we may develop a number of ‘pathways’ to help projects think about their project and what evaluation they want or need and then provide a number of tools to fit different scenarios.
But this isn’t all altruistic behaviour, at least not on the part of the PB Unit. We recognise that for our own ongoing reputation and work we need to start to provide a more comprehensive national picture of PB, both in terms of the similarities and differences in PB projects around the three countries that PB is currently happening. So we need the tools in order that projects can provide us with relatively consistent information that we can compare across projects.
We’re just at the beginning of this project – having gathered information and views from different stakeholders we’re embarking on a long and interesting journey. So if you’d like to be involved or be kept informed of our project, please do let us know and we’ll do our best.
