Date: Wednesday, February 5, 2025
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
We’re Diane Collis and Oralia Gómez-Ramírez, two public health professionals working on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples. Our practice in food literacy and public health evaluation recently took us on a process of using creative writing tools to analyze community-based information. Here’s how our process looked and what we learned.
From mid-to-late 2023, our team conducted 15 half-to-full-day community engagement sessions with facilitators of the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control’s flagship Food Skills for Families Program. We set out to inform the update to the program by evaluating its current components and learning directly from the people who deliver it in specific regional and food systems contexts.
We had a sizeable qualitative dataset of 855-page stenographic transcripts and a 73-page overview summary. Different team members had been involved in this project at various points and in multiple capacities. Given this, our task in early 2024 was to effectively and efficiently analyze the data collected and produce a community-friendly report.
We used tools and prompts from the creative writing world to collectively craft high-level themes about what we had learned and envision how the program could evolve.
We undertook a series of facilitated sessions with six program staff, including people who had attended the sessions, prepared the data for analysis, and brought different food skills, community engagement, population health equity, and evaluation expertise angles to the process.
Our process interweaved thematic analysis concepts with hands-on, creative writing prompts, followed by group discussions. Food concepts like “food menu,” “food group classifications,” and “grocery shopping basket” first helped convey the analytical approach. Then, through spoken word catalogue exercises, haiku poems, found poetry, and narrative description prompts, the writing group participants established the arc or overarching story of the report, considered key messages conveyed to different audiences, narrowed down and distilled bucket areas and thematic issues, established assertions, and chose pertinent examples.
Using an arts-based approach in this evaluation project offered us key insights:
Our team members shared how the process took them out of familiar ways of doing evaluation—a process anticipated to be square or linear—and into an experience where thoughts, feelings, and intuition flew differently. Since then, we have continued collaborating in implementing creative approaches, such as games and magnetic tile building, into our public health evaluation work.
Check out this AEA365 blog post to reflect on why one must choose the appropriate arts-based tools for the right context. Similarly, for thinking through the tasks that each creative approach enables and the limits it imposes in evaluation work, we recommend reading this “Comics-based research” article.
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