Section 2: Introduction: Communication for Social Change: An Integrated Model for Measuring the Process and Its Outcomes

Social Change Process Indicators

Introduction


In this section, we provide indicators with which to measure the process of community dialogue and collective action. In addition to specific measures for each stage, two summary matrices are provided as well, one for dialogue and one for collective action. The matrices give a "snapshot" of exactly how a particular community has acted: who and how many engaged in dialogue and participated in decisions, whether or not measurable objectives were identified, whether specific people were assigned to each task and if outside resources used. But first we address the question of who uses the model for evaluation and for what purpose.

Assessment and evaluation of the process and its outcomes can be conducted by three different groups:

• Members of the community who want to know how well their effort has achieved the objectives they set for themselves and how much more needs to be done,
• External change agents involved in the process who need to document how well a community has performed, and
• Social scientists who want to conduct a systematic analysis of the relationship between the process and its outcomes across a sample of communities.

The distinctions made across the three types of evaluators reflect the difference in goals that each one has, and these differences also determine which indicators described below are used, and how they are reported.

For members of the community, the dialogue in which they have participated should have led to a clearer vision of the future, and assessment of community's status when they begin, and some concrete and measurable objectives to accomplish. In the final stage of the collective-action process, the community needs to reassess its status in terms of the objectives that it set for itself. This is identical to assessment of the current state, which should occur in the dialogue process, but which also involves comparing the initial state of the community to its (new) current state after the project is completed.

Did they reach or exceed these objectives? What contributed to, or prevented, their reaching these objectives? If community wells were built how many were finished and, more importantly, how many and which community members benefited from having them? The degree of success is crucial for motivating the community to continue working on problems together and for developing a belief in and greater value for continual improvement. This is why it is so important that they do this assessment themselves, for themselves. If for some reason they do not reassess their situation, nothing will be learned and the likelihood that further action would be taken will diminish.

This type of self-evaluation is central to the participatory development communication. In practice, self-evaluation is often skipped over, especially when projects are initiated by outside agents who hold a rigid notion of evaluation or an anti-participatory ideology (Servaes, 2001). The communication for social-change model explicitly incorporates participatory evaluation into the process itself rather than leaving it for others to do at another time.

Outside agents, if they have taken responsibility for initiating the dialogue and action process, often have obligations to their own funding sources to provide feedback regarding how well their goals are being met. In this situation, the model and its indicators can be used to collect additional information required by the project. For example, change agents may have a goal of increasing the level of participation, equity of information and decision making that initially some community members may not have. By measuring previous levels of participation and styles of leadership, and then documenting how the project influenced and changed these features of the community, the change agent may also change the way community members view the collective-action process itself. Especially if greater participation and sharing of responsibility contributed to the success of the project, then community members may endorse these aspects of the process as goals themselves and strive to improve them in their next round of dialogue and action.

For this to happen, the change agent needs to provide feedback to the community about these issues and encourage them to work on these issues. If the information is buried in the agent's own report, then the likelihood of development in this respect would be expected to diminish substantially, even if community members have some vague idea about how things took place.

And finally, a rigorous, systematic investigation of the process and outcomes may be undertaken by social scientists in cooperation with change agents. Participative observation, extensive in-depth interviews with knowledgeable informants, systematic focus-group discussions with subgroups within the community, and even surveys with statistical analysis may be conducted using the indicators described below. In addition to providing more details about the process and outcomes to community members and external funding agencies, such an extensive, systematic investigation — especially if it is done over a number of communities — would provide the opportunity to increase the general knowledge about dialogue and collective action. The results would have implications for both practice and theory. For example, the theory that greater motivation (and hence, action) occurs when moderate, feasible goals are set versus goals that are either too easy or impossible to achieve, can be tested and confirmed by examining a wide range of community experiences. In fact, such an analysis may be the only way to establish what constitutes a "moderate, feasible" set of objectives in a particular situation.

Other aspects of the model would benefit from this type of analysis as well. In a particular culture, what balance of strong authoritative leadership and participatory decision making leads to the greatest satisfaction among community members as well as the most successful collective action? What type leads to greater motivation to participate in another project? These are difficult, complex questions that require more information than community members would normally obtain for their own purposes, or that change agents would obtain to meet their own reporting obligations. The knowledge gained from such an analysis could lead to better training programmes, more effective guidance by change agents and more effective dialogue and action within communities.