Participatory Evaluation for Researchers: Super Team Guide | Issue 6 of 12
Who's This For
You convene partners. Maybe it is an annual meeting of a multi-institutional collaboration, a kick-off gathering for a new grant, or a network-wide convening where universities, community colleges, community organizations, and tribal education offices share a room for two days.
You want to understand how the network actually works: who is connected, who is isolated, where the energy is flowing and where it is not. But the tools you have are surveys and interviews, and the people in the room are tired of both.
This issue is for you if you have ever wanted to see your partnership network rather than just hear people describe it. You are about to discover that handing people yarn and index cards produces evaluation data that no survey instrument could generate.
The Partnership Moment
You are facilitating a convening of about fifty partners. Universities, community colleges, tribal education offices, nonprofits. A cross-institutional network that has been working together for two years. Your funder wants to know how the network is developing. Are new connections forming? Are existing partnerships deepening? Is the network maturing toward shared purpose or just accumulating contacts?
You sent a survey last month. Twenty-three people responded. The data says most respondents are "satisfied" with network activities and "somewhat likely" to continue participating. You know this tells you almost nothing about the actual structure of the network, the quality of relationships, or where the gaps are.
Sitting in that room, you can feel that some partnerships are thriving while others are stalled. You can sense that certain institutions are over-connected while others sit at the margins. You can tell that good intentions have not always translated into real collaboration. But you cannot point to evidence. You cannot show your funder a picture of what the network looks like.
What if the people in the room could build that picture for you, and learn something about themselves in the process?
Under the Surface
The survey problem in network evaluation runs deeper than low response rates. Surveys ask people to summarize complex relational dynamics in discrete categories. "Rate the quality of your partnerships on a scale of 1-5." What does a 3 mean? Is it a strong relationship with one partner and a weak one with another, averaged to mediocrity? Is it a genuinely moderate connection? Is it a polite answer to a question the respondent does not think is the right question?
Relational dynamics are spatial, visual, and embodied. People understand their networks through metaphor. They talk about being "close to" or "far from" partners, about "bridges" and "gaps" and "clusters." These are spatial concepts. Asking people to translate them into numbered scales strips away the information that matters most.
Physical construction activities work because they bypass the translation problem. Instead of asking people to convert relational understanding into survey language, you give them materials to build what they see. The construction process surfaces tacit knowledge: the things people know about their network but cannot articulate in a text box. When someone stretches a piece of yarn across a wall to connect their card to a partner's card, they are making visible something that was previously invisible.
The artifact that results (a yarn map, a model, a physical layout) is permanent, photographable, and analyzable. It captures collective understanding, not just individual responses. And the building process itself creates the community-building experience that your program is supposed to deliver. The activity is the evaluation, and the evaluation is the activity.
