NSVRC Evaluation Toolkit Case Studies

Participatory Evaluation at the Local Level

(Alexandra Panagotacos, personal communication, August 12, 2015, Updated July 2019)

Project Description

As part of her agency’s school-based prevention efforts, Allison coordinates a group of student 
leaders. When the time came to develop outcome measures for her program, she facilitated several 
brainstorming sessions with these student leaders in order to get a better sense of what was 
happening in their communities. The information from those conversations was used in conjunction 
with Allison’s own knowledge and skills about program evaluation to come up with a list of possible 
items for an evaluation tool. From there, the young people helped decide which ones to keep, which 
ones to modify, and which ones to remove. They also pilot tested it before she used it. When it 
becomes outdated, Allison intends to take it back to the group for further refinement. Allison noted 
that at the end of this process, these students knew what they wanted to change, why, and how they 
would measure it.

Approach

She also considered having the young people involved in participatory data collection through various 
kinds of formal observation but decided against it because she felt like it might contribute to 
drama in the small school she was working in and also didn’t think she could control for bias among 
the student leaders. However, informally, she has students observe what’s happening among their peers 
and report back to her; she uses this information in shaping program direction.

When it’s time for analysis and interpretation, she will sometimes sit down with participants and 
with colleagues to look at the data in different ways to come up with different possible interpretations, 
see what’s connected, and so on. They try to figure out why some things changed but not others.

Lessons Learned

Allison notes that it is helpful if the group is representative of the students who will be participating 
in programming. She noticed that when the group was less representative of the participants, some 
of the language and the concepts in the items chosen were problematic for other students. She advocated 
expanding her leadership group to include students who the administration did not regard as typical 
leaders. One such student who was failing her classes managed to pull her grades back up after data 
from the evaluation process helped her see that she could make a difference.

Tips
Use this case study for training and evaluation capacity building on participatory evaluation with 
the tools from the NSVRC Evaluation Toolkit Training and Capacity–Building Activities Guide 
(begins on pg. 15). The guide walks you through how to facilitate a group activity using the case study.

This publication  was supported by the Grant or Cooperative Agreement Number, NUF2CE002359-05, funded 
by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the 
authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Centers for Disease Control and 
Prevention or the Department of Health and Human Services.

© 2019 National Sexual Violence Resource Center. All rights reserved.

nsvrc.org/evaluation-toolkit