Learn how to develop a plan for community assessment to guide efforts to better understand community needs and resources.

Developing a plan for identifying local needs and resources can help changemakers understand how to improve their communities in the most logical and efficient ways possible. This section provides a guide for developing and implementing a plan to assess the needs of communities and the resources available to them.

What do we mean by needs and resources?

Needs can be defined as the gap between what is and what should be. A need can be felt by an individual, a group, or an entire community. It can be as concrete as the need for food and water or as abstract as improved community cohesiveness. An obvious example might be the need for public transportation in a community where older adults have no means of getting around town. More important to these same adults, however, might be a need to be valued for their knowledge and experience. Examining situations closely helps uncover what is truly needed, and leads toward future improvement.

Resources, or assets, can include individuals, organizations and institutions, buildings, landscapes, equipment — anything that can be used to improve the quality of life. The mother in Chicago who volunteers to organize games and sports for neighborhood children after school, the Kenyan farmers’ cooperative that makes it possible for farmers to buy seed and fertilizer cheaply and to send their produce directly to market without a middle man, the library that provides books and Internet access to everyone, the bike and walking path where city residents can exercise — all represent resources that enhance community life. Every individual is a potential community asset, and everyone has assets that can be used for community building.

Why develop a plan for assessing local needs and resources?

There are really two questions here: The first is Why assess needs and resources? Answers include:

• It will help you gain a deeper understanding of the community. Each community has its own needs and assets, as well as its own culture and social structure — a unique web of relationships, history, strengths, and conflicts that defines it. A community assessment helps to uncover not only needs and resources, but the underlying culture and social structure that will help you understand how to address the community’s needs and utilize its resources.
• An assessment will encourage community members to consider the community’s assets and how to use them, as well as the community’s needs and how to address them.  That consideration can (and should) be the first step in their learning how to use their own resources to solve problems and improve community life.
• It will help you make decisions about priorities for program or system improvement. It would obviously be foolhardy to try to address community issues without fully understanding what they are and how they arose.  By the same token, failing to take advantage of community resources not only represents taking on a problem without using all the tools at your disposal to solve it, but misses an opportunity to increase the community’s capacity for solving its own problems and creating its own change.
• It goes a long way toward eliminating unpleasant surprises down the road.  Identifying needs and resources before starting a program or initiative means that you know from the beginning what you’re dealing with, and are less likely to be blindsided later by something you didn’t expect.

The second question is: Why develop a plan for that assessment? Some reasons why you should:

• It allows you to involve community members from the very beginning of the process. This encourages both trust in the process and community buy-in and support, not only of the assessment, but of whatever actions are taken as a result of it. Full community participation in planning and carrying out an assessment also promotes leadership from within the community and gives voice to those who may feel they have none.
• An assessment is a great opportunity to use community-based participatory research, further involving community members and increasing community capacity.
• A good plan will provide an easy-to-follow road map for conducting an accurate assessment.  Planning ahead will save time and effort in carrying out the process.
• A planning process will give community members the opportunity to voice their opinions, hopes, and fears about the community. Their idea of priorities might be different from those of professionals, but they shouldn’t be ignored.

It may be important to address the community’s priorities first, in order to establish trust and show respect, even if you don’t believe that those priorities are in fact the most important issues.  Building relationships and credibility may be more important at the beginning of a long association than immediately tackling what seems to be the most pressing need.  Among other things, community members’ priorities may be the right ones: they may see underlying factors that you don’t yet understand.

Who should be involved in developing a plan for assessing local needs and resources?

As we’ve discussed, the assessment process benefits greatly when there’s full participation from community stakeholders. Among those who should be involved:

• Those experiencing needs that should be addressed. It’s both fair and logical to involve those who are most directly affected by adverse conditions. They know best what effects those conditions have on their lives, and including them in the planning process is more likely to produce a plan that actually speaks to their needs.
• Health and human service providers. These individuals and organizations, especially those that are community-based, often have both a deep understanding of the community and a strong empathic connection with the populations they serve.  They can be helpful both by sharing their knowledge and by recruiting people from marginalized populations to contribute to the assessment.
• Government officials. Elected and appointed officials are often those who can help or hinder a community change effort. Engaging them in planning and carrying out an assessment helps to ensure that they will take the effort seriously and work to make it successful.
• Influential people. These can can include individuals who are identified as leaders because of their positions — college presidents, directors of hospitals and other major organizations, corporate CEOs — because of the prestige of their professions — doctors, professors, judges, clergy — or because they are known to be people of intelligence, integrity, and good will who care about the community.
• People whose jobs or lives could be affected by the eventual actions taken as a result of the assessment. These include teachers, police, emergency room personnel, landlords, and others who might have to react if new community policies or procedures are put in place.
• Community activists. People who have been involved in addressing policy or issues that could come up in the course of the assessment have a stake in planning the assessment as well.
• Businesses, especially those that employ people from populations of concern. The livelihoods of local business owners could be affected by the results of the assessment, as could the lives of their employees.

When should needs and assets be identified?

Identifying needs and assets can be helpful to your organization at almost any point in your initiative. If your group has a specific goal, such as reducing teen pregnancy, identifying local needs (better communication between parents and teens, education programs, etc.) and resources (youth outreach programs, peer counselors) related to the issue can help you craft a workable, effective goal. On the other hand, if your organization is more broad-based — if you’re dedicated to helping the health needs of under-served people in your city, for example — identifying assets and needs can help you decide which aspect of the problem to tackle first.

Assessments of resources and needs should be done regularly throughout your initiative:

• Prior to planning the initiative. This gives coalition members, community leaders, and those being served an idea of how to improve their circumstances.
• During implementation of an initiative. It is important to make sure that you are on target not only at the beginning and the end of a project, but also during its implementation. If car companies only did quality checks on the steel before the parts are constructed and the paint job after it rolled off the line, you might not be inclined to trust the engine. Identifying needs and assets during the life of the initiative helps you use your own resources well, and ensures that you’re addressing the right issues in the right way.
• On an ongoing basis. During monitoring and evaluation, either ongoing or after the completion of a project, it is important to celebrate successes and to learn from setbacks to further community development.

How do you develop a plan for assessing local needs and resources?

The best way to assess needs and assets is by using as many of the available sources of information as possible.  “Possible” here depends on how easy the information is to find and collect, and what your resources — mostly of people, money, and time — will support. Developing a plan will allow you to take these considerations into account and use the results to determine goals, devise methods, and create a structure for a community assessment that will give you the information you need to conduct a successful effort.

The following guidelines, while they are laid out in a step-by-step order, may often turn out in practice to take a different sequence. You may find yourself carrying out two or more steps at once, for example, or switching the order of two steps.

Recruit a planning group that represents all stakeholders and mirrors the diversity of the community

Try to be as inclusive as you can, so that the group is diverse and truly representative of the community.  You may have to work particularly hard to persuade people from groups that are generally not offered seats at the table — low-income people, immigrants, etc. — that you actually want their participation, especially if they’ve been burned by insincere offers in the past.  It’s worth it to take the time and effort, however, in order to get a real picture of all aspects of the community.

A truly representative planning group is not only more likely to come up with a plan that produces an accurate assessment, but is also a signal to community members that they are part of the process. They are more apt to trust that process and support whatever comes out of it.

Now is also the time to think about whether the planning group will also oversee the assessment. That arrangement often makes the most sense, but not always. If the planning group won’t be the coordinating body, then part of its planning should determine who ought to be part of that group, and how to assemble it.

Another important determination at this point is whether the planning group and those who will actually conduct the assessment — contact informants, construct surveys, facilitate public meetings, gather data, and report on and evaluate the assessment process — will need training, and if so, how much and of what kind.  Many people that haven’t had a great deal of formal education, belong to groups that are often denied a voice in community affairs, or belong to a culture other than the mainstream one don’t have the meeting and deliberation skills that many middle-class citizens take for granted. They might need training and/or mentoring to learn how to contribute effectively to a planning group.  In addition, many people may need training in data collection methods, evaluation, and other areas important to the assessment process.  Whatever training is needed has to be not only anticipated but planned out, so that it gets done in a timely and useful way. Now is the time to start thinking about it.

Design an evaluation process for the assessment, including the development of the plan

Why is this step here, at the beginning of the planning process, rather than at the end? The answer is that evaluation should start at the beginning of an effort, so that you can monitor everything you do and be able to learn from and adjust any part of the process — including planning — to improve your work.  That’s the purpose of evaluation: to make your work as effective as possible.

Decide why you want to conduct the assessment

There are a number of reasons why you might want to conduct a community assessment of needs and resources, among them:

The reasons for an assessment will affect from whom and how you gather information, what is assessed, and what you do with the information you get.  It’s obviously important to start planning with a clear understanding of what you’re setting out to do, so that your plan matches your goals.

• Determining how to address the needs of a particular underserved or neglected group.
• Conducting a community health assessment in order to launch a public health campaign or combat a particular disease or condition.
• Exploring how to steer the activities of a coalition of service providers or government agencies.
• Understanding community needs and resources as a guide to advocacy efforts or policy change. You can’t make credible policy recommendations without knowing about current conditions and the effects on them of current policy.
• Assessing the impact, intensity, and distribution of a particular issue, to inform strategies for approaching it. This may involve breaking the issue down still further, and investigating only a part of it.  Rather than looking at the whole issue of violence, for instance, you might want to focus on domestic violence or youth violence or violence among teenage girls.

Determine what data is already available

The chances are that a good deal of information about the community already exists. Resources:

It’s important that make sure that whatever data exists is timely. The chances are that if it’s more than six months to a year old, it’s out of date and no longer accurate.  Even census data, which is extensive and generally reliable, is a snapshot of a particular time. Since a full census is a once-a-decade event, census information may be as much as ten years out of date. There are updates in between, but only to selected categories, and not every year.

• Federal government statistics, such as census and public health data. In the U.S., much of this information can be found on the websites of the U.S. Census, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Department of Health and Human Services.
• County Health Rankings & Roadmaps provides important health-related rankings and data for nearly every county in each U.S. state.
• Assessments or studies conducted by local or state/provincial governments or government agencies.
• Assessments or studies conducted by other organizations. Hospitals, human service providers, Chambers of Commerce, and charitable organizations may all conduct community assessments for their own purposes, and may be willing — or even eager — to share their results.
• Studies conducted by researchers connected to local universities.
• What you already know about the needs and assets of the community. The caution here is to realize that what you think you know may either be wrong, or may conflict with the opinions of community members. You should be ready to accept the facts if they conflict with your opinion, or to consider, as we’ve mentioned, the possibility of yielding to the community’s perception of its own needs.

Figure out what other information you need

This is the time to finalize the questions you’ll ask your informants, as well as the questions you hope to answer with the assessment. Those questions will depend on your purposes. In most cases, you’ll want to find out what is important to members of populations of concern or those who might benefit from or be affected by any action you might take as a result of the assessment. You will probably also want to hear the opinions of the people who serve or work with those people — doctors, human service staff and administrators, teachers, police, social workers, advocates, etc.

In addition, it will probably be helpful to look at some community level indicators, such as:

• The number of and reasons for emergency room or clinic visits.
• The number of places to buy fresh produce in various neighborhoods.
• The percentage of motor vehicle accidents and traffic stops involving alcohol.
• The number of teen births in the community in the past year, compared to those in other similar communities, in the state or province (or country) as a whole, and/or in past years.

Before you start, take careful stock of your resources — people, money, skills, time — to be sure you can do all you plan to. An assessment can be conducted with volunteers and lots of (free) legwork, or it can require statistical and other expertise, professional consultation, and many paid hours. Don’t plan an assessment that you don’t have the resources to carry out.

Decide what methods you’ll use for gathering information

Much of the rest of this chapter is devoted to methods of gathering assessment data.  Some general descriptions:

Each community is different, and so you might use any one or any combination of these and other methods detailed in this chapter, depending on what you’re looking for and who can help.

• Using existing data. This is the research you might do to unearth the information in census and other public records, or to find information that’s been gathered by others.
• Listening sessions and public forums. Listening sessions are forums you can use to learn about the community’s perspectives on local issues and options. They are generally fairly small, with specific questions asked of participants. They can help you get a sense of what community members know and feel about the issue, as well as resources, barriers, and possible solutions. Public forums tend to be both larger in number of participants and broader in scope than listening sessions. They are gatherings where citizens discuss important issues at a well-publicized location and time. They give people of diverse backgrounds a chance to express their views, and are also a first step toward understanding the community’s needs and resources. A good public forum informs the group of where the community is and where the members would like to go.
• Interviews and focus groups. These are less formal than forums, and are conducted with either individuals or small groups (usually fewer than ten, and often as few as two or three.)  They generally include specific questions, but allow room for moving in different directions, depending on what the interviewees want to discuss. Open-ended questions (those which demand something more than a yes or no or other simple answer), follow-ups to interesting points, and a relaxed atmosphere that encourages people to open up are all part of most assessment interviews. A focus group is a specialized group interview in which group members are not told exactly what the interviewer wants to know, so that they will be more likely to give answers that aren’t influenced by what they think is wanted.
• Direct, and sometimes participant, observation. Direct observation involves seeing for yourself.  Do you want to know how people use the neighborhood park on weekends? Spend a few weekends there, watching and talking to people. If you regularly join a volleyball game or jog through the park with others, you’re a participant observer, becoming part of the culture you want to learn about.
• Surveys. There are several different kinds of surveys, any or all of which could be used as part of a community assessment. Written surveys may be sent to people in the mail, given out at community events or meetings, distributed in school, or handed to people on the street. People may also be surveyed by phone or in person, with someone else writing down their spoken answers to a list of questions. Many kinds of surveys often have a low return rate, and so may not be the best way to get information, but sometimes they’re the only way, or can be given in situations where most people complete them.
• Asset Mapping. Asset mapping focuses on the strengths of the community rather than the areas that need improvement. Focusing on assets gives the power back to the community members that directly experience the problem and already have the resources to change the status quo. If the changes are made by the community and for the community, it builds a sense of cohesiveness and commitment that makes initiatives easier to sustain.

Decide whom you’ll gather information from

For the same reason that you’ve put together a planning group that represents all the different sectors of the community concerned or involved with the assessment, you should try to get information from as broad a range of people and groups as possible. The greater the variety of people that supply your data, the better perspective you’ll have on the real nature, needs, and resources of the community.

Who the people concerned with your particular assessment are, however, depends on your particular focus and purposes. If you’re concerned with domestic violence, you’d certainly want to include those directly or indirectly exposed to it, as well as emergency room personnel and police, in your data gathering.  If you’re concerned with preserving open space, you might look to include both environmentalists and developers. That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t want the opinions of a variety of others, but simply that you’d try to make sure that the people with the most interest and knowledge — and often the most to gain or lose — could have their say.  You wouldn’t want to miss valuable information, regardless of the opinions of the informant.

This brings up an important point.  Your plan should make sure that the assessment includes the opportunity for all points of view to be aired. You may not like what some people have to say, but if you don’t know that there are people with differing opinions, you only have half of the information you need.

Decide who will collect data

Will you use a participatory research process, whereby community members gather data themselves or in collaboration with professionals? Will you hire an individual or a group to gather information? If you choose neither of these, then who will do the work of interviewing, surveying, or carrying out whatever other strategies you’ve chosen to find information?

These are important questions, because their answers can affect the quality and quantity of information you get. Individuals in the community may be more willing to be interviewed and/or to give honest and detailed answers to people they know or can identify with, i.e., other community members. Participatory researchers may need training to be able to do a good job. You may need an experienced researcher to put together a survey that gets at the issues you’re most concerned with. A combination of several types of data gatherers may work best.  It’s worth spending some time on this issue, so that you can assemble the crew that’s right for your community and your plan.

Decide how you’ll reach your informants

In order to get information from people, you’ll have to contact them. There are many ways to do that, and you’ll probably want to use several of them. In general, the more personal the approach, the more effective it will be. Some of the most common:

• Posting requests on one or more local websites or on social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• Choosing people at random (e.g., from the phone book) to receive written or telephone surveys.
• Mailing or emailing surveys to one or more lists.  Many organizations are willing to share lists of members or participants for purposes like this.  Some will mail or email surveys under their own names, so that people receive them from an organization they’re familiar with, and might be more willing to complete and return them than if they apparently came to them randomly.
• Stopping people in a public place to ask them to fill out or, more commonly, give verbal answers to a short survey.  You may have had the experience of being asked your opinion in a shopping area or on a busy sidewalk.  People are somewhat more willing to answer questions in this way than to fill out and return a mailed or emailed survey.
• Putting up posters and distributing flyers in public places (supermarkets, laundromats, bus stops, etc.) and/or sending them to specific organizations and businesses.
• Using the media. This can involve holding press conferences and sending out press releases, placing PSA’s (public service announcements) and stories in various media, or paying for media advertising.
• Direct appeal to existing community groups. Either a member of the planning team or a leader or member of the group in question might make an appeal at a club meeting, a religious gathering, or a sports event for volunteers to participate in a survey, an interview or focus group, or a larger meeting.
• Personal approach. Members of the planning group might recruit friends, colleagues, neighbors, family members, etc. by phone or in person. They might also ask the people they recruit to ask others, so that a few people can start a chain of requests that ends up with a large number.

Decide who will analyze the data and how they’ll do it

Once you’ve collected the information, you have to analyze it to see what it means. That means identifying the main themes from interviews and forums, sorting out the concerns of the many from those of the insistent few, understanding what your indicators seem to show, comparing community members’ concerns with the statistics and indicators, and perhaps a number of other analytical operations as well. Some of these might involve a knowledge of statistics and higher math, while others may require only common sense and the ability to group information in logical ways.

If you’ve engaged in a participatory research process, the community researchers should also be involved in analyzing the material they’ve found. They might do this in collaboration with professionals from local organizations, with consulting academic researchers, or with a paid consultant. If you’ve decided to hire an individual or group to conduct the assessment, then they’ll probably conduct the analysis as well.

In either case, the methods used will probably depend on such considerations as how “hard” you want the data to be — whether you want to know the statistical significance of particular findings, for example, or whether you’ll use people’s stories as evidence — how much you think you need to know in order to create an action plan, and what kinds of data you collect. Chapter 37, although its title concerns evaluation, is actually about research methods, and contains a lot of good information about how to approach the choice of methods.

Plan whatever training is needed

We’ve already discussed the possible need for training. Now is the time to decide what, if any, training is needed, who should be involved, and who will conduct it. In order to keep members of the planning group on an equal footing, it might make sense to offer the training to everyone, rather than just to those who are obviously not highly educated or articulate. It is probably important as well that the training be conducted by people who are not members of the planning group, even if some of them have the skills to do so. The group will function best if everyone feels that everyone else is a colleague, even though members have different backgrounds and different sets of skills and knowledge.

Decide how you’ll record the results of the assessment and present them to the community

Depending on your goals and what’s likely to come out of the assessment, “the community” here may mean the whole community or the community of stakeholders that is represented on the planning committee. In either case, you’ll want to be able to explain clearly what the assessment found, and perhaps to engage people in strategizing about how to deal with it. That means you’ll want to set out the results clearly, in simple, everyday language accompanied by easy-to-understand charts, pictures, and/or graphs. Your report doesn’t have to be complicated or to use technical language in order to be compelling. In fact, the more you can use the words of the community members who contributed their concerns and experiences, the more powerful your report will be.

How will you communicate the results to the community? With the availability of PowerPoint and similar programs, you have the opportunity to create a professional-looking presentation that you can use in a number of ways. It could be presented as a slide show in one or more public meetings or smaller gatherings, posted along with a narrative on one or more social media sites (Facebook, YouTube, etc.) and/or on your website, run as a loop in a public place, such as a local library, or even broadcast on community access TV.  Furthermore, it could be used by a number of people without each having to fetch and carry large and cumbersome equipment or signboards and the like.

Decide who will perform what assessment tasks

The group should make sure everyone has a role that fits her skills, talents, and, to the extent possible, preferences.  It should also make sure that all necessary tasks are covered.  If more people need to be recruited — as data gatherers, survey mailers, phone callers, etc. — that recruitment should be part of the plan. The point of having a plan is to try to anticipate everything that’s needed — as well as everything that might go wrong — and make sure that it has been arranged for. Assigning tasks appropriately is perhaps the most important part of that anticipation.

Create a timeline

Work out what should happen by when. How long will you spend on preparing for the assessment — contacting people, training interviewers and/or group facilitators, preparing and printing surveys? How long will you gather information? How long will you take to analyze the data and write up a report? Each phase of the assessment should have a deadline. That creates benchmarks — checkpoints along the way that tell you you’re moving in the right direction and have gotten far enough along so that you’ll finish the assessment on time with the information you need.

Present the plan, get feedback, and adjust it to make it more workable

Once the plan is done, it should be presented to at least a sample of those who will be asked for information and those who will have responsibilities for parts of the assessment.  This will allow them to consider whether the plan takes the culture of the community into account, and is likely to make data collection and analysis as easy as possible.  As a result of their feedback, you can adjust parts of the plan to make them more acceptable to the community or more workable for the assessment team.

Now you can celebrate the completion of the plan, but it’s not an occasion for resting on your laurels

There’s a lot of work ahead as you conduct the assessment, analyze the data you get from it, and make and implement action plans based on that analysis. It’s important to have benchmarks built into the assessment plan and the action plans that follow, so you can keep track of your progress.  But it’s also important to hold your long-term vision in view, and to keep moving toward it until the community becomes what all its members want it to be.

In Summary

Needs and resources are really two sides of the same coin. In order to get a comprehensive view of your community, it is important to look at what you have and what you need. With these things in mind, you can have a positive impact on the problem you wish to address. Understanding the community’s needs and assets will also help your organization clarify where it would like to go and how it can get there.

Examine the community and record your findings in a community description or overview for credibility and awareness.

• What is a community?

• What do we mean by understanding and describing the community?

• Why make the effort to understand and describe your community?

• Whom should you contact to gather information?

• How do you go about understanding and describing the community?

For those of us who work in community health and development, it’s important to understand community — what a community is, and the specific nature of the communities in which we work. Anything we do in a community requires us to be familiar with its people, its issues, and its history. Carrying out an intervention or building a coalition are far more likely to be successful if they are informed by the culture of the community and an understanding of the relationships among individuals and groups within it.

Taking the time and effort to understand your community well before embarking on a community effort will pay off in the long term. A good way to accomplish that is to create a community description — a record of your exploration and findings. It’s a good way to gain a comprehensive overview of the community — what it is now, what it’s been in the past, and what it could be in the future. In this section, we’ll discuss how you might approach examining the community in some detail and setting down your findings in a community description.

What is a community?

While we traditionally think of a community as the people in a given geographical location, the word can really refer to any group sharing something in common — place (such as a city, neighborhood, or school district), experience (such as shared experience of racism), or interest (e.g., a community’s concern about poverty or violence prevention).

These various communities often overlap. A Black art teacher, for example, might see herself (or be seen by others) as a member of the Black, arts, and/or education communities, as well as of a particular faith community. Whichever community defines your work, you will want to get to know it well.

What do we mean by understanding and describing the community?

Understanding the community entails understanding it in a number of ways. Whether or not the community is defined geographically, it still has a geographic context — a setting that it exists in. Getting a clear sense of this setting may be key to a full understanding of it. At the same time, it’s important to understand the specific community you’re concerned with. You have to get to know its people — their culture, their concerns, and relationships — and to develop your own relationships with them as well.

• Physical aspects. Every community has a physical presence of some sort, even if only one building. Most have a geographic area or areas they are either defined by or attached to. It’s important to know the community’s size and the look and feel of its buildings, its topography (the lay of the land — the hills, valleys, rivers, roads, and other features you’d find on a map), and each of its neighborhoods. Also important are how various areas of the community differ from one another, and whether your impression is one of clean, well-maintained houses and streets, or one of shabbiness, dirt, and neglect.If the community is one defined by its population, then its physical properties are also defined by the population: where they live, where they gather, the places that are important to them. The characteristics of those places can tell you a great deal about the people who make up the community. Their self-image, many of their attitudes, and their aspirations are often reflected in the places where they choose — or are forced by circumstance or discrimination — to live, work, gather, and play.
• Infrastructure. Roads, bridges, transportation (local public transportation, airports, train lines), electricity, land line and mobile telephone service, broadband service, and similar “basics” make up the infrastructure of the community, without which it couldn’t function.
• Patterns of settlement, commerce, and industry. Where are those physical spaces we’ve been discussing? Communities reveal their character by where and how they create living and working spaces. Where there are true slums —  substandard housing in areas with few or no services that are the only options for low-income people — the value the larger community places on those residents seems clear. Are heavy industries located next to residential neighborhoods? If so, who lives in those neighborhoods? Are some parts of the community dangerous, either because of high crime and violence or because of unsafe conditions in the built or natural environment?
• Demographics.  It’s vital to understand who makes up the community.  Age, gender, race and ethnicity, marital status, education, number of people in household, first language — these and other statistics make up the demographic profile of the population. When you put them together (e.g.,  the education level of black women ages 18-24), it gives you a clear picture of who community residents are.
• History. The long-term history of the community can tell you about community traditions, what the community is, or has been, proud of, and what residents would prefer not to talk about. Recent history can afford valuable information about conflicts and factions within the community, important issues, past and current relationships among key people and groups — many of the factors that can trip up any effort before it starts if you don’t know about and address them.
• Community leaders, formal and informal. Some community leaders are elected or appointed — mayors, city councilors, directors of public works. Others are considered leaders because of their activities or their positions in the community — community activists, corporate CEO’s, college presidents, doctors, clergy.  Still others are recognized as leaders because, they are trusted for their proven integrity, courage, and/or care for others and the good of the community.
• Community culture, formal and informal. This covers the spoken and unspoken rules and traditions by which the community lives. It can include everything from community events and slogans — the blessing of the fishing fleet, the “Artichoke Capital of the World” — to norms of behavior — turning a blind eye to alcohol abuse or domestic violence — to patterns of discrimination and exercise of power. Understanding the culture and how it developed can be crucial, especially if that’s what you’re attempting to change.
• Existing groups.  Most communities have an array of groups and organizations of different kinds — service clubs (Lions, Rotary, etc.), faith groups, youth organizations, sports teams and clubs, groups formed around shared interests, the boards of community-wide organizations (the YMCA, the symphony, United Way), as well as groups devoted to self-help, advocacy, and activism.  Knowing of the existence and importance of each of these groups can pave the way for alliances or for understanding opposition.
• Existing institutions. Every community has institutions that are important to it, and that have more or less credibility with residents. Colleges and universities, libraries, religious institutions, hospitals — all of these and many others can occupy important places in the community. It’s important to know what they are, who represents them, and what influence they wield.
• Economics.  Who are the major employers in the community?  What, if any, business or industry is the community’s base? Who, if anyone, exercises economic power? How is wealth distributed? Would you characterize the community as poor, working, class, middle class, or affluent?  What are the economic prospects of the population in general and/or the population you’re concerned with?
• Government/Politics. Understanding the structure of community government is obviously important. Some communities may have strong mayors and weak city councils, others the opposite. Still other communities may have no mayor at all, but only a town manager, or may have a different form of government entirely.  Whatever the government structure, where does political power lie? Understanding where the real power is can be the difference between a successful effort and a vain one.
• Social structure. Many aspects of social structure are integrated into other areas — relationships, politics, economics — but there are also the questions of how people in the community relate to one another on a daily basis, how problems are (or aren’t) resolved, who socializes or does business with whom, etc. This area also includes perceptions and symbols of status and respect, and whether status carries entitlement or responsibility (or both).
• Attitudes and values. Again, much of this area may be covered by investigation into others, particularly culture. What does the community care about, and what does it ignore? What are residents’ assumptions about the proper way to behave, to dress, to do business, to treat others? Is there widely accepted discrimination against one or more groups by the majority or by those in power? What are the norms for interaction among those who with different opinions or different backgrounds?

We’ll discuss all of these aspects of community in greater detail later in the section.

There are obviously many more aspects of community that can be explored, such as health or education.  The assumption here is that as part of an assessment, you’ll aim for a general understanding of the community, as described in this section, and also assess, with a narrower focus, the specific aspects you’re interested in.

Once you’ve explored the relevant areas of the community, you’ll have the information to create a community description. Depending on your needs and information, this description might be anything from a two-or three-page outline to an in-depth portrait of the community that extends to tens of pages and includes charts, graphs, photographs, and other elements. The point of doing it is to have a picture of the community at a particular point in time that you can use to provide a context for your community assessment and to see the results of whatever actions you take to bring about change.

A community description can be as creative as you’re capable of making it.  It can be written as a story, can incorporate photos and commentary from community residents (see Photovoice), can be done online and include audio and video, etc. The more interesting the description is, the more people are likely to actually read it.

Why make the effort to understand and describe your community?

You may at this point be thinking, “Can’t I work effectively within this community without gathering all this information?” Perhaps, if it’s a community you’re already familiar with, and really know it well. If you’re new to the community, or an outsider, however, it’s a different story. Not having the proper background information on your community may not seem like a big deal until you unintentionally find yourself on one side of a bitter divide, or get involved in an issue without knowing about its long and tangled history.

Some advantages to taking the time to understand the community and create a community description include:

• Gaining a general idea, even before an assessment, of the community’s strengths and the challenges it faces.
• Capturing unspoken, influential rules and norms. For example, if people are divided and angry about a particular issue, your information might show you an event in the community’s history that explains their strong emotions on that subject.
• Getting a feel for the attitudes and opinions of the community when you’re starting work on an initiative.
• Ensuring the security of your organization’s staff and participants.  There may be neighborhoods where staff members or participants should be accompanied by others in order to be safe, at least at night. Knowing the character of various areas and the invisible borders that exist among various groups and neighborhoods can be extremely important for the physical safety of those working and living in the community.
• Having enough familiarity with the community to allow you to converse intelligently with residents about community issues, personalities and geography. Knowing that you’ve taken the time and effort to get to know them and their environment can help you to establish trust with community members.  That can make both a community assessment and any actions and activities that result from it easier to conduct.
• Being able to talk convincingly with the media about the community.
• Being able to share information with other organizations or coalitions that work in the community so that you can collaborate or so that everyone’s work can benefit.
• Providing background and justification for grant proposals.
• Knowing the context of the community so that you can tailor interventions and programs to its norms and culture, and increase chances of success.

When should you make an effort to understand and describe the community?

• When you’re about to launch a community assessment. The first step is to get a clear sense of the community, before more specifically assessing the area(s) you’re interested in.
• When you’re new to a community and want to be well informed before beginning your work. If you’ve just started working in a community — even if it’s work you’ve been doing for years — you will probably find that taking the time to write a community description enriches your work.
• When you’ve been working in a community for any length of time and want to take stock. Communities are complex, constantly-changing entities. By periodically stopping to write a detailed description of your community, you can assess what approaches have worked and what haven’t; new needs that have developed over time and old concerns that no longer require your effort and energy; and other information to help you better do your work.
• When you’re feeling like you’re stuck in a rut and need a fresh perspective. Organizations have to remain dynamic in order to keep moving forward. Reexamining the community — or perhaps examining it carefully for the first time — can infuse an organization with new ideas and new purpose.
• When you’re considering introducing a new initiative or program and want to assess its possible success.Aside from when you first come to a community, this is probably the most vital time to do a community description.
• When a funder asks you to, often as part of a funding proposal.

While researching and writing a community description can take time, your work can almost always benefit from the information you gather.

Whom should you contact to gather information?

Much of your best and most interesting information may come from community members with no particular credentials except that they’re part of the community. It’s especially important to get the perspective of those who often don’t have a voice in community decisions and politics — low-income people, immigrants, and others who are often kept out of the community discussion. In addition, however, there are some specific people that it might be important to talk to. They’re the individuals in key positions, or those who are trusted by a large part of the community or by a particular population. In a typical community, they might include:

• Elected officials
• Community planners and development officers
• Chiefs of police
• School superintendents, principals, and teachers
• Directors or staff of health and human service organizations
• Health professionals
• Clergy
• Community activists
• Housing advocates
• Presidents or chairs of civic or service clubs — Chamber of Commerce, veterans’ organizations, Lions, Rotary, etc.
• People without titles, but identified by others as “community leaders”
• Business owners

How do you go about understanding and describing the community?

General Guidelines

To begin, let’s look at some basic principles to keep in mind.

• Be prepared to learn from the community. Assume that you have a lot to learn, and approach the process with an open mind. Listen to what people have to say. Observe carefully. Take notes — you can use them later to generate new questions or to help answer old ones.
• Be aware that people’s speech, thoughts, and actions are not always rational. Their attitudes and behavior  are often best understood in the context of their history, social relations, and culture. Race relations in the U.S., for example, can’t be understood without knowing some of the historical context — the history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and the work of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement.
• Don’t assume that the information people give you is necessarily accurate. There are a number of reasons why informants may tell you things that are inaccurate. People’s perceptions don’t always reflect reality, but are colored instead by what they think or what they think they know.  In addition, some may intentionally exaggerate or downplay particular conditions or issues for their own purposes or for what they see as the greater good. (The Chamber of Commerce or local government officials might try to make economic conditions look better than they are in the hopes of attracting new business to the community, for instance.)  Others may simply be mistaken about what they tell you  — the geographical boundaries of a particular neighborhood, for example, or the year of an important event. Get information, particularly on issues, conditions, and relationships from many sources if you can. As time goes on, you’ll learn who the always-reliable sources are.
• Beware of activities that may change people’s behavior. It’s well known that people (and animals as well) can change their normal behavior as a result of knowing they’re being studied.  Neighborhood residents may clean up their yards if they’re aware that someone is taking the measure of the neighborhood. Community members may try to appear as they wish to be seen, rather than as they really are, if they know you’re watching. To the extent that you can, try not to do anything that will change the way people go about their daily business or express themselves. That usually means being as unobtrusive as possible — not being obvious about taking pictures or making notes, for instance. In some circumstances, it could mean trying to gain trust and insight through participant observation.

Participant observation is a technique that anthropologists use.  It entails becoming part of another culture, both to keep people in it from being influenced by your presence and to understand it from the inside.  Some researchers believe it addresses the problem of changing the culture by studying it, and others believe that it makes the problem worse.

• Take advantage of the information and facilities that help shape the world of those who have lived in the community for a long time. Read the local newspaper (and the alternative paper, too, if there is one), listen to local radio, watch local TV, listen to conversation in cafes and bars, in barbershops and beauty shops.  You can learn a great deal about a community by immersing yourself in its internal communication. The Chamber of Commerce will usually have a list of area businesses and organizations, along with their contact people, which should give you both points of contact and a sense of who the people are that you might want to get in touch with. Go to the library — local librarians are often treasure troves of information, and their professional goal is to spread it around. Check out bulletin boards at supermarkets and laundromats.  Even graffiti can be a valuable source of information about community issues.
• Network, network, network.  Every contact you make in the community has the potential to lead you to more contacts. Whether you’re talking to official or unofficial community leaders or to people you just met on the street, always ask who else they would recommend that you talk to and whether you can use their names when you contact those people. Establishing relationships with a variety of community members is probably the most important thing you can do to ensure that you’ll be able to get the information you need, and that you’ll have support for working in the community when you finish your assessment and begin your effort.

Gathering information

To find out about various aspects of the community, you’ll need a number of different methods of gathering information. We’ve already discussed some of them, and many of the remaining sections of this chapter deal with them, because they’re the same methods you’ll use in doing a full community assessment. Here, we’ll simply list them, with short explanations and links to sections where you can get more information about each.

• Public records and archives. These include local, state, and federal government statistics and records, newspaper archives, and the records of other organizations that they’re willing to share. Many of the public documents are available at public and/or university libraries and on line at government websites. Most communities have their own websites, which often contain valuable information as well.
• Individual and group interviews. Interviews can range from casual conversations in a cafe to structured formal interviews in which the interviewer asks the same specific questions of a number of carefully chosen key informants. They can be conducted with individuals or groups, in all kinds of different places and circumstances. They’re often the best sources of information, but they’re also time-consuming and involve finding the right people and convincing them to consent to be interviewed, as well as finding (and sometimes training) good interviewers.

Interviews may include enlisting as sources of information others who’ve spent time learning about the community.  University researchers, staff and administrators of health and human service organizations, and activists may all have done considerable work to understand the character and inner workings of the community.  Take advantage of their findings if you can.  It may save you many hours of effort.

• Surveys. There are various types of surveys. They can be written or oral, conducted with a selected small group — usually a randomized sample that represents a larger population — or with as many community members as possible. They can be sent through the mail, administered over the phone or in person, or given to specific groups (school classes, faith congregations, the Rotary Club). They’re often fairly short, and ask for answers that are either yes-no, or that rate the survey-taker’s opinion of a number of possibilities (typically on a scale that represents “agree strongly” to “disagree strongly” or “very favorable” to “very unfavorable.”)  Surveys can, however, be much more comprehensive, with many questions, and can ask for more complex answers.
• Direct or participant observation.  Often the best way to find out about the community is simply to observe. You can observe physical features, conditions in various areas, the interactions of people in different neighborhoods and circumstances, the amount of traffic, commercial activity, how people use various facilities and spaces, or the evidence of previous events or decisions. Participant observation means becoming part of the group or scene you’re observing, so that you can see it from the inside.

Observation can take many forms.  In addition to simply going to a place and taking notes on what you see, you might use other techniques — Photovoice, video, audio, simple photographs, drawings, etc.  Don’t limit the ways in which you can record your observations and impressions.

Understanding the Community

Now let’s consider what you might examine to understand and describe the community. You won’t necessarily look for this information in the order given here, although it’s a good idea to start with the first two.

The community’s physical characteristics.

Get a map of the community and drive and/or walk around. (If the community isn’t defined by geography, note and observe the areas where its members live, work, and gather.) Observe both the built and the natural environment. In the built environment, some things to pay attention to are:

• The age, architecture, and condition of housing and other buildings. Some shabby or poorly-maintained housing may occupy good buildings that could be fixed up, for example — that’s important to know. Is there substandard housing in the community? Look for new construction, and new developments, and take note of where they are, and whether they’re replacing existing housing or businesses or adding to it. (You might want to find out more about these. Are they controversial? Was there opposition to them, and how was it resolved? Does the community offer incentives to developers, and, if so, for what?)  Is housing separated by income or other factors, so that all low-income residents, for instance, or all North African immigrants seem to live in one area away from others? Are buildings generally in good condition, or are they dirty and run-down? Are there buildings that look like they might have historic significance, and are they kept up? Are most buildings accessible to people with disabilities?
• Commercial areas.  Are there stores and other businesses in walking distance of residential areas or of public transportation for most members of the community? Do commercial buildings present windows and displays or blank walls to pedestrians? Is there foot traffic and activity in commercial areas, or do they seem deserted? Is there a good mix of local businesses, or nothing but chain stores? Are there theaters, places to hear music, a variety of restaurants, and other types of entertainment? Do many buildings include public spaces — indoor or outdoor plazas where people can sit, for example? In general, are commercial areas and buildings attractive and well-maintained?
• The types and location of industrial facilities. What kind of industry exists in the community? Does it seem to have a lot of environmental impact — noise, air or water pollution, smells, heavy traffic? Is it located close to residential areas, and, if so, who lives there? Is there some effort to make industrial facilities attractive — landscaping, murals or imaginative color schemes on the outside, etc?
• Infrastructure.  What condition are streets in?  Do most streets, at least in residential and commercial areas, have sidewalks? Bike lanes? Are pedestrians shielded from traffic by trees, grass strips, and/or plantings? Are roads adequate for the traffic they bear? Are there foot bridges across busy highways and railroad tracks, or do they separate areas of the community and pose dangers for pedestrians? Is there adequate public transportation, with facilities for people with physical disabilities? Does it reach all areas of the community? Can most people gain access to the Internet if they have the equipment (i.e., computers or properly equipped cell phones)?

This is a topic that is ripe for examination. In many rural areas, particularly in developing countries, but often in the developed world as well, there is very little infrastructure.  Roads and bridges may be impassable at certain (or most) times of year, phone service and TV reception nonexistent, Internet access a distant dream. Public transportation in many places, if it exists at all, may take the form of a pickup truck or 20-year-old van that takes as many passengers as can squeeze into or onto the bed, passenger compartment, and roof. Is any of this on the government’s or anyone else’s radar as a situation that needs to be addressed? What is the general policy about services to rural and/or poor populations?  Answers to these and similar questions may both explain the situation (and the attitudes of the local population) and highlight a number of possible courses of action.

In the category of natural features, we can include both areas that have been largely left to nature, and “natural” spaces created by human intervention.

• Topography. An area’s topography is the shape of its landscape. Is the community largely hilly, largely flat, or does it incorporate areas of both? Is water — rivers, creeks, lakes and ponds, canals, seashore — a noticeable or important part of the physical character of the community? Who lives in what areas of the community?
• Open space and greenery. Is there open space scattered throughout the community, or is it limited to one or a few areas? How much open space is there? Is it mostly man-made (parks, commons, campuses, sports fields), or is there wilderness or semi-wilderness? Does the community give the impression  of being green and leafy, with lots of trees and grass, or is it mostly concrete or dirt?
• Air and water. Is the air reasonably clear and clean, or is there a blanket of smog? Does the air generally smell fresh, or are there industrial or other unpleasant odors? Do rivers, lakes, or other bodies of water appear clean? Do they seem to be used for recreation (boating, swimming, fishing)?

There is an overlap between the community’s physical and social characteristics. Does the lay of the land make it difficult to get from one part of the community to another? (Biking, or in some cases even walking, is difficult in San Francisco, for example, because of the length and steepness of the hills.)  Are there clear social divisions that mirror the landscape — all the fancy houses in the hills, all the low-income housing in the flats, for instance?

Studying the physical layout of the community will serve you not only as information, but as a guide for finding your way around, knowing what people are talking about when they refer to various areas and neighborhoods, and gaining a sense of the living conditions of any populations you’re concerned with.

Community demographics.

Demographics are the facts about the population that you can find from census data and other similar statistical information. Some things you might like to know, besides the number of people in the community:

• Gender
• Racial and ethnic background
• Age.  Numbers and percentages of the population in various age groups
• Marital status
• Family size
• Education
• Income
• Employment – Both the numbers of people employed full and part-time, and the numbers of people in various types of work
• Location – Knowing which groups live in which neighborhoods or areas can help to recruit participants in a potential effort or to decide where to target activities

In the U.S., most of this and other demographic information is available from the U.S. Census, from state and local government websites, or from other government agencies.  Depending on what issues and countries you’re concerned with, some sources of information might be the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, similar websites in other countries, and the various agencies of the United Nations.

On many of these websites, notably the U.S. Census, various categories can be combined, so that you can, for example, find out the income levels in your community for African American women aged 25-34 with a high school education. If the website won’t do it for you, it’s fairly easy to trace the patterns yourself, thus giving you a much clearer picture of who community residents are and what their lives might be like.

Another extremely useful resource is County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, which provides rankings for nearly every county in the nation. The County Health Rankings model includes four types of health factors: health behaviors, clinical care, social and economic, and the physical environment. The County Health Rankings illustrate what we know when it comes to what’s making people sick or healthy, and the new County Health Roadmaps show what we can do to create healthier places to live, learn, work and play. These reports can help community leaders see that our environment influences how healthy we are and how long we live, and even what parts of our environment are most influential.

Community history.

This can be a complex topic. The “standard” history — when the community was founded and by whom, how long it has existed, how people lived there in the past, its major sources of work, etc. — can often be found in the local library or newspaper archives, or even in books or articles written for a larger audience. The less comfortable parts of that history, especially recent history — discrimination, conflict, economic and/or political domination by a small group — are may not be included, and are more likely to be found by talking to activists, journalists, and others who are concerned with those issues. You might also gain information by reading between the lines of old newspaper articles and tracking down people who were part of past conflicts or events.

If this all sounds a lot like investigative reporting, that’s because it is.  You may not have the time or skills to do much of it, but talking to activists and journalists about recent history can be crucial.  Stepping into a community with an intervention or initiative without understanding the dynamics of community history can be a recipe for failure.

Community government and politics.

There are a number of ways to learn about the structure and operation of local government:

• Go to open meetings of the city council, town boards, board of selectmen, or other bodies, as well as to public forums on proposed actions, laws, and regulations.  Such meetings will be announced in the local paper.

In most of the U.S., these meetings are public by state law, and must be announced in specific ways at least two days ahead.

• Community bylaws and regulations are often available at the public library.
• Make an appointment to talk to one or more local government officials.  Many hold regular office hours, and might actually take pleasure in explaining the workings of the local government.
• Talk to community activists for a view of how the government actually operates, as opposed to how it’s supposed to operate.
• Read the local newspaper every day.

Reading the newspaper every day is a good idea in general if you’re trying to learn about the community.  It will not only have stories about how the community operates, but will give you a sense of what’s important to its readers, what kinds of activities the community engages in and views as significant, what the police do — a picture of a large part of community life. Real estate ads will tell you about property values and the demand for housing, ads for services can help you identify the major businesses in town, and the ages and education levels of the people in the marriage and birth announcements can speak volumes about community values.  Newspaper archives can also reveal the stories that help you understand the emotions still surrounding events and issues that don’t seem current.  The newspaper is an enormous reservoir of both direct and between-the-lines information.

As we all know, government isn’t only about the rules and structures that hold it together. It’s about people and their interactions…politics, in other words. The political climate, culture, and assumptions in a particular community often depend more on who elected and appointed officials are than on the limits or duties of their offices.

The politics of many communities embody the ideal of government working for the public good. In other communities, politics takes a back seat to economics, and politicians listen largely to those with economic power — the CEO’s, owners, and directors of large businesses and institutions.  In still others, the emphasis is on power itself, so that political decisions are made specifically to keep a particular party, group, or individual in control.

Obviously, only in the first case is the public well served. In the other situations, fairness and equity tend to go out the window and decisions favor the powerful. Understanding the politics of the community — who has power, who the power brokers are, who actually influences the setting of policy, how decisions are made and by whom, how much difference public opinion makes — is fundamental to an understanding of the community as a whole.

There’s no formal way to get this information. Government officials may have very different interpretations of the political scene than activists or other community members. You’ll have to talk to a variety of people, take a good look at recent political controversies and decisions (here’s where newspaper archives can come in handy), and juggle some contradicting stories to get at the reality.

Institutions.

Community institutions, unless they are dysfunctional, can generally be viewed as assets. Finding them should be easy: as mentioned above, the Chamber of Commerce will probably have a list of them, the library will probably have one as well, the local newspaper will often list them, and they’ll be in the phone book.

They cover the spectrum of community life, including:

• Offices of local, state, and federal government agencies (Welfare, Dept. of Agriculture, Office of Immigration, etc.)
• Public libraries.
• Religious institutions. Churches, synagogues, mosques.
• Cultural institutions.  Museums, theaters, concert halls, etc. and the companies they support.  These may also encompass community theater and music companies run and staffed by community volunteer boards and performers.
• Community centers.  Community centers may provide athletic, cultural, social, and other (yoga, support groups) activities for a variety of ages.
• YMCA’s and similar institutions.
• Senior centers.
• Hospitals and public health services.
• Colleges and universities.
• Public and private schools.
• Public sports facilities. These might be both facilities for the direct use of the public — community pools and athletic fields, for example — or stadiums and arena where school, college, or professional teams play as entertainment.

Groups and organizations.

The groups and organizations that exist in the community, and their relative prestige and importance in community life, can convey valuable clues to the community’s assumptions and attitudes. To some extent, you can find them in the same ways that you can find institutions, but the less formal ones you may be more likely to learn about through interviews and conversations.

These groups can fall into a number of categories:

• Health and human service organizations.  Known on the world stage as NGO’s (Non-Governmental Organizations), these are the organizations that work largely with low-income people and populations at risk. They encompass free or sliding-scale health clinics, family planning programs, mental health centers, food pantries, homeless shelters, teen parent programs, youth outreach organizations, violence prevention programs, etc.
• Advocacy organizations. These may also provide services, but generally in the form of legal help or advocacy with agencies to protect the rights of specific groups or to push for the provision of specific services. By and large, they advocate for recognition and services for populations with particular characteristics, or for more attention to be paid to particular issues.
• Service clubs. Lions, Rotary, Kiwanis, Elks, Masons, etc.
• Veterans’ organizations. In the U.S., the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars are the major veterans’ organizations, but many communities may have others as well.
• Chamber of Commerce and other business organizations. Some of these may be oriented toward specific types of businesses, while others, like the Chamber, are more general.
• Groups connected to institutions. Church youth or Bible study groups, school clubs, university student groups (e.g., Foreign Students’ Association, community service groups).
• Trade unions. These may be local, or branches of national or international unions.
• Sports clubs or leagues. Enthusiasts of many sports organize local leagues that hold regular competitions, and that may compete as well with teams from other communities. In many rural areas, Fish and Game clubs may function as informal community centers.
• Informal groups. Book clubs, garden clubs, parents’ groups, etc.

Economics/employment.

Some of the information about economic issues can be found in public records, but some will come from interviews or conversations with business people, government officials, and activists, and some from observation. It’s fairly easy to notice if one huge industrial plant dominates a community, for example, or if every third building appears to be a construction company. There are a number of questions you might ask yourself and others to help you understand the community’s economic base and situation: What is the anchor of the community’s tax base? Who are the major employers? Does the community have a particular business or business/industry category that underlies most of the jobs? Are there lots of locally-owned businesses and industries, or are most parts of larger corporations headquartered elsewhere?  Are there corporate headquarters in the community? Is there a good deal of office space, and is it empty or occupied?  Is there new development, and is the community attracting new business? What is the unemployment rate?

Social structure.

This may be the most difficult aspect of the community to understand, since it incorporates most of the others we’ve discussed, and is usually unspoken. People’s answers to questions about it may ignore important points, either because they seem obvious to those who’ve lived with them for all or most of their lives, or because those things “just aren’t talked about.” Distrust or actual discrimination aimed at particular groups — based on race, class, economics, or all three — may be glossed over or never mentioned. The question of who wields the real power in the community is another that may rarely be answered, or at least not answered in the same way by a majority of community members. It’s likely that it will take a number of conversations, some careful observation and some intuition as well to gain a real sense of the community’s social structure.

Describing the Community

Once you’ve gathered the information you need, the next step is describing the community. This is not really separate from understanding the community: in the process of organizing and writing down your information, you’ll be able to see better how it fits together, and can gain greater understanding.

There are many ways you can create a description of the community. The most obvious is simply to organize, record, and comment on your information by category:  physical description, government, institutions, etc. You can comment about what has changed in the community over time, what has stayed the same, and where you think the community might be going. You might also include an analysis of how the various categories interact, and how that all comes together to form the community that exists. That will give you and anyone else interested a reasonably clear and objective description of the community, as well as a sense of how you see it.

For a fuller picture, you could add photographs of some of the locations, people, conditions, or interactions you describe (perhaps as a Photovoice project), as well as charts or graphs of demographic or statistical information. For even more detail, you might compose a portrait in words of the community, using quotes from interviews and stories of community history to bring the description to life.

Given the availability of technology, you don’t have to limit yourself to any specific format. Computers allow you to easily combine various media — photos, graphics, animation, text, and audio, for example. The description could  add in or take the form of a video that includes a tour of the community, statements from and/or interviews with various community members (with their permission, of course), an audio voice-over, maps, etc.  A video or a more text-based description — or both — could then be posted to a website where it would be available to anyone interested.

Once you have a description put together, you might want to show it to some of the community members you talked to in the course of exploring the community. They can suggest other things you might include, correct errors of fact, and react to what they consider the accuracy or inaccuracy of your portrait and analysis of their community. With this feedback, you can then create a final version to use and to show to anyone interested. The point is to get as informative and accurate a picture of the community as possible that will serve as a basis for community assessment and any effort that grows out of it.

The last word here is that this shouldn’t be the last community description you’ll ever do. Communities reinvent themselves constantly, as new buildings and developments are put up and old ones torn down, as businesses move in and out, as populations shift — both within the community and as people and groups move in and out — and as economic, social, and political conditions change. You have to keep up with those changes, and that means updating your community description regularly.  As with most of the rest of the community building work described in the Community Tool Box, the work of understanding and describing the community is ongoing, for as long as you remain committed to the community itself.

In Summary

Understanding a community is crucial to being able to work in it. Failing to understand it will deny you credibility and make it difficult for you both to connect with community members and to negotiate the twists and turns of starting and implementing a community initiative or intervention. An extremely important part of any community assessment, therefore, is to start by finding out as much about the community as you can — its physical and geographical characteristics, its culture, its government, and its assumptions. By combing through existing data, observing, and learning from community members, you can gain an overview of the community that will serve you well. Recording your findings and your analysis of them in a community description that you can refer to and update as needed will keep your understanding fresh and help others in your organization or with whom you collaborate.

Learn how to collect information on the problem or issue to develop credibility, knowledge, awareness, and to build support for action.

• Why should you collect information about the problem?

• How do you collect this information?

• What are the limitations of using this information?

Quantitative information is crucial to building awareness and gathering support for community issues. Hard data analysis provides a concrete approach for assessing, planning, and implementing community projects. It can be a valuable tool in comparing community problems across geographic regions and across periods of time. This section discusses how to gather data through focus groups, public forums, and surveys, and how and when to implement the information into community planning.

Why should you collect information about the problem?

Many of us hate doing research. Perhaps you, too, have found yourself staring at pages of figures and equations and decided it was a really good day for a root canal. The advantages of having this information at your fingertips, however, are enormous. We think it’s really a worthwhile task, for many reasons. Some of the best include:

• Knowledge. Reality talks. Knowing the facts is a stark way of determining the size of the gap between your vision of a healthy community and the reality in which you live. Gathering information from the time period before your organization got started (also known as baseline data) is an excellent way to show the magnitude of the problem.
• Credibility counts. If you are able to talk easily in a casual conversation about the exact numbers of people affected by the issue you are involved in, you come across as knowledgeable, serious, and well organized. Writing down those same figures (in greater detail, of course) as part of a grant application or project summary for potential funders and evaluators says that you are a well-run group who can get the job done.
• Awareness leads to change. You can use the statistics you have found to raise community awareness of a number of things: how serious the problem is, how well (or how poorly) your community is doing in relation to other communities or to the nation as a whole, and last but not least: how well your coalition is attacking the problem at hand.

How do you collect this information?

So, how do you go about finding this information? There are two ways to go about it: you can use information that’s already out there (after all, there’s no sense in reinventing the wheel); or, if what you are looking for just doesn’t seem to exist, you can collect new information yourself. Either way, there are ten steps you will want to go through, to help make your information collecting as efficient and as painless as possible.

Ten steps in information collection

1. Agree on the value and purpose of the information that you will collect

As we have said, we think there are a lot of excellent, general reasons to have the facts about your issue at your fingertips. But why, exactly, does your group need this information? How will you use it? Will it be shown only to members of your organization, or do you want to make it public? For example, the AIDS project in a small community might come up against large amounts of prejudice trying to discuss the percentage of young people who practice safe sex. The staff of the project may decide that information is useful for planning purposes, but may decide to publicly discuss a different topic, such as the number of babies who are born HIV-positive.

2. Determine when you want to use this data

Another important decision you need to make is when is this data important. This is really two decisions:

• For what time period do you want to find information? Often, it’s helpful to look for information either right now, or from the time when your coalition first got started. This latter information, sometimes known as baseline data, tells the scope of the problem before you started work. Later on in the lifespan of your coalition, you can track how things have changed, and determine how effective you have been.

Additionally, many organizations find it a good idea to collect information on a regular basis, such as once a year. This helps you to keep on top of the latest information (always helpful for grantmakers, as well as for your constituents), as well as to determine your effectiveness, as we mentioned above. This also lets you examine the trends important to your group as they change from year to year.

• When do you want to make this information public? Often, you want to make the information known right away. Other times, however, you might want to wait a bit. Maybe you would like to announce it in conjunction with a national/international event that is happening, in hopes of gathering even more media coverage.

For example, you might want to announce the dramatic rise in the number of people in your city who are HIV-positive on December 1st, which is International AIDS Day. Alternatively, an important local event, such as a symposium on youth violence, can be an excellent time to get the message out.

3. Determine exactly what you want to know

What, exactly, do you want to know? Are you just looking for statistics, or do you want to collect some qualitative information (life stories, local heroes, etc.) as well? Do you want to determine incidence rate, or prevalence rate, or both (see the example at the end of this chapter for information on these rates)? And on which issues? The more precise you are in your thinking at the beginning, the easier you will find your search.

4. Determine who will find the information

Will it be you? A staff member? A volunteer? Do you want one person to focus on collecting the data, or do you want to have several people working on it? Brainstorm who in your organization has experience in collecting data, and also who might be interested in doing so. And do they have enough time to do the job?

5. Identify possible sources of information

There are a lot of different places where you can find relevant information, depending on your topic. Some of them include:

• The state or county health department can help you determine health indicators on a variety of issues.
• The state human service department should be able to tell you the number of recipients of Medicaid, and food stamp program participants.
• Hospital admission and exit records exist and can give you information on teen fertility, causes of death, etc. Depending on where you live, some of the data may not be part of the public record, but it may be possible to purchase some of it, or arrange to use it in some form.
• Census data: Demographic information is available for your community and the United States as a whole. This information can be found on Bureau of Census. Many states have similar information on their own web sites as well.
• County Health Rankings & Roadmaps: This website provides health rankings for nearly every county in the nation. The County Health Rankings model includes four types of health factors: health behaviors, clinical care, social and economic, and the physical environment. The County Health Rankings illustrate what we know when it comes to what’s making people sick or healthy, and can help community leaders see that our environment influences how healthy we are and how long we live, and even what parts of our environment are most influential.
• Police records can tell you crime rates and the incidence of problems such as domestic violence or motor vehicle accidents.
• Chamber of Commerce data discusses job growth, the unemployment rate, etc.
• Nonprofit service agencies, such as the United Way or Planned Parenthood, generally have records on a variety of different issues. Often, these agencies have already conducted surveys and found the information you need.
• School districts can tell you graduation rates, test scores, and truancy rates for your school and others. For comparative figures across school districts, check with your state department of education.
• Centers for Disease Control reportable disease files can give you national information on the rates of many diseases, such as AIDS.
• Your reference librarian is often a very helpful person.
• Other professional contacts you have can lead you to sources of information particular to your interest.
• Statistical Abstract of the United States is a good general source in print for national information. It’s done annually, and is available in most local libraries.
• Specialized local, statewide, or national organizations may help. For example, if you were interested in Alzheimer’s disease, or tree planting, or lead poisoning, you would want to track down and consult with an organization specializing in that field. (Gale’s Encyclopedia of Associations is a good national source). Many such organizations have good web sites of their own, too.

6. Set limits as to how much information you want to collect

Too much information will be just as much of a problem as not enough. Decide on the limits of what you are going to collect, or you will just get lost among the stacks of data that have piled up on your desk.

7. Collect the data

If you have done all of the preparatory work up to this point, this is the easy part. List the sources of data you have found, both in order of those you think are best and those you think are easiest to find (see the Tools section for an example). Start with those, and then get to work.

8. Identify gaps in your knowledge

After you have finished collecting, it’s time to take a hard look at the information you have found. Were you able to determine everything you were looking for, or did you not find some important data? Perhaps the information that you have found has made you realize there is other helpful information that you didn’t originally research.

For example, when you were researching the rate of people who have HIV in your community, maybe you realized that many of these people have at least one other sexually transmitted disease (STD) as well. So then, you decide you would like to broaden your information gathering to include how many people with other STDs have contracted AIDS. Alternatively, you might decide that having another STD is a risk factor for HIV-positive.

9. Redo the process to try to fill those gaps — or collect your own data

Now that you have identified what information you still need to find, you have two choices. You might have simply missed a good information source the first time, so brainstorm with others in your group to see if you can think of any places you missed. However, it’s also possible, that the information you want to find just isn’t out there, in which case it’s up to you to collect it. See the following heading, Collecting new information, to learn how to do this.

10. If possible, you might want to compare data for your community with that of other communities, or that of the nation as a whole or to trend out your own community’s data over time.

It’s good to put the information you have found in context, either positive or negative. Saying, “The level of violent crime in our community is twice the national average,” helps put the magnitude of the problem you are facing in the proper perspective for the rest of the community. And on the other hand, if you can say, “The rate of students who graduate from high school in our city is 10% above the national average,” it’s a great way to celebrate your community’s strengths.

Collecting new information

Usually, when you are trying to determine facts about the problem, the information is already out there, in one form or another. If you’ve looked, though, and are absolutely sure that the information you need just isn’t there, it’s time to create it yourself. To do so, you’ll still need to go through the ten steps listed above, except for number five; but in addition, you will want to do the following:

1. Identify the method of collecting information that is best suited to your purpose.  Different methods that are often used include:

• Surveys are one of the best ways to find the quantitative information that your organization may want to know. They can be written, face to face, or done by telephone.
• Focus groups, public forums, and listening sessions are all good ways to find information as well. However, these approaches are better suited to finding qualitative information than to determining quantified facts.

2. Decide if you want to inform the public of what you are doing.

And if you decide that it is tactically wise, then let people know what you are doing from the start. (You will probably want to update them during and after the process as well.) You might consider writing a press release to do so. Include key facts that you have gathered from earlier data. For example, you might say, “In 1990, the teen pregnancy rate in Godnaw County was 26 girls out of every 1000, or 2.6%. The Godnaw County Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program is in the process of finding out how this figure has changed in the last eight years.”

Remember, though, that when you tell people what you are doing, they will usually have questions. So be prepared with a clear process for responding to any queries or concerns that might arise.

3. Train the people who will be collecting the information.

Sending poorly trained staff members or volunteers to collect new information can cause serious problems and lead to results that are unhelpful at best. At worst, this can invalidate all of the time and effort you spent trying to determine the information. The manner in which questions are asked, who is asked, and even when they are asked can have a huge impact on the results you receive. So train your information collectors before you start.

4. Collect and tabulate your data.

Although this can take a while, as mentioned before, if you have done all the steps leading up to this, you’re once again at the easy part. Good luck!

5. Report (and use) your findings.

Even if you decided during the planning process to wait to go public with your findings, you will still probably discuss them with members of your group right away. You might ask everyone at a staff meeting to talk about how this new information will change their individual projects, or work together to rewrite the project plan.

In any case, be sure to use the information you have found, don’t just file it away somewhere!

6. Continue to review and collect information on a regular basis.

Unless you’re planning to conduct a short intervention or initiative and then leave town, you’ll need to update the information you have. Communities and conditions change, and you can’t assume that what’s true today will still be true in six months or a year. If the data you have is more than a year old, it’s simply not reliable. You have to plan to keep collecting data for the long term.

What are the limitations of using this information?

Of course, knowing the incidence and prevalence of a problem is certainly not a cure-all for solving all of your coalition’s woes, nor is it the only information worth collecting. In the worst case, the information can actually mislead people who are trying to understand the problem. As Mark Twain was fond of saying, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

When you are collecting or speaking about your data, be sure to:

• Obtain your data from enough people to make it worthwhile. Or, if you are using previously gathered information, find out how many people were studied. As a rule of thumb, don’t determine a rate from a population of less than 30 people – and although that’s the smallest number that can be used to generate most statistics, it’s probably nowhere near enough to give an accurate picture. There just aren’t enough people for your data to be credible. If you did a voluntary survey on drug use among high school students and only got 5 respondents, your results might vary widely from the truth.

For example, you may have had 5 students who don’t use drugs at all, (There are no drugs in our schools!) or maybe four of the students were friends who all smoke marijuana regularly (80% of our students use drugs on a regular basis!) Probably neither of these statistics is close to the truth. The sample population simply wasn’t large enough to get a true estimate.

• When you are giving a rate, never forget to give it, as the definition states, in terms of another measured quantity.

For example, just saying, 43 students are smokers, doesn’t give the listener enough information to really understand the problem. Is it 43 students out of 50? Or out of 5000? Always be sure to give your information in context. A confused listener is not someone who will be helpful to your cause.

• As helpful as statistics can be, they don’t ever tell the whole story. People relate to individual stories: the friendly neighborhood mechanic who died of lung cancer, the fourth grader who was killed in a drive by shooting. Just the facts might be good police work; but for your organizations work, never forget the people behind those statistics.

In Summary

There is a story about a group of birds who took a class to learn to fly. They all attended the class faithfully for weeks, and then, when it was over, they all tucked their diplomas under their wings and walked back home. So use the information you have found to further your cause, and fly with it. There’s no question that changing our communities for the better is a tough battle. But by being able to determine the magnitude of the problem, you’ve made a powerful first step towards winning the war.

Learn how to identify community assets and resources, and how to engage them in the community change effort.

Many community organizations focus on the needs or deficits of the community. Every community has needs and deficits that ought to be attended to.

But it is also possible to focus on assets and strengths — emphasizing what the community does have, not what it doesn’t. Those assets and strengths can be used to meet those same community needs; they can improve community life.

To draw upon a community’s assets, we first have to find out what they are. So in this section, we will focus on identifying community assets and resources. We’ll also show how they can be harnessed to meet community needs and to strengthen the community as a whole.

What is a community asset?

Our definition is broad. A community asset (or community resource, a very similar term) is anything that can be used to improve the quality of community life. And this means:

• It can be a person — Residents can be empowered to realize and use their abilities to build and transform the community. The stay-at-home mom or dad who organizes a playgroup. The informal neighborhood leader. The firefighter who risks his life to keep the community safe. These are all community assets.
• It can be a physical structure or place — a school, hospital, church, library, recreation center, social club. It could be a town landmark or symbol. It might also be an unused building that could house a community hospice, or a second floor room ideal for community meetings. Or it might be a public place that already belongs to the community — a park, a wetland, or other open space.
• It can be a community service that makes life better for some or all community members – public transportation, early childhood education center, community recycling facilities, cultural organization.
• It can be a business that provides jobs and supports the local economy.
• You and everyone else in the community are potential community assets. Everyone has some skills or talents, and everyone can provide knowledge about the community, connections to the people they know, and the kind of support that every effort needs – making phone calls, stuffing envelopes, giving people information, moving equipment or supplies – whatever needs doing. This suggests that everyone in the community can be a force for community improvement if only we knew what their assets were, and could put them to use.

One student of communities, John McKnight, has noted:
“Every single person has capacities, abilities and gifts. Living a good life depends on whether those capacities can be used, abilities expressed and gifts given.”

Why should you identify community assets?

• They can be used as a foundation for community improvement.
• External resources (e.g., federal and state money) or grants may not be available. Therefore, the resources for change must come from within each community.
• Identifying and mobilizing community assets enables community residents to gain control over their lives.
• Improvement efforts are more effective, and longer-lasting, when community members dedicate their time and talents to changes they desire.
• You can’t fully understand the community without identifying its assets. Knowing the community’s strengths makes it easier to understand what kinds of programs or initiatives might be possible to address the community’s needs.
• When efforts are planned on the strengths of the community, people are likely to feel more positive about them, and to believe they can succeed. It’s a lot easier to gain community support for an effort that emphasizes the positive – “We have the resources within our community to deal with this, and we can do it!” – than one that stresses how large a problem is and how difficult it is to solve.

Who should identify community assets?

Community members of all stripes and from all sectors should be involved in identifying assets. One reason here is the commitment to participatory process that you’ll find in most Community Tool Box sections. An even more important one, however, is that community members from a broad range of groups and populations are far more likely to identify assets that may not be apparent to everyone. The community’s perception of what constitutes an asset or a resource is at least as legitimate as the “standard” list of institutions and people with specific skills.

A number of garbage-strewn, overgrown empty lots in a neighborhood can be seen as an eyesore and a neighborhood shame. But those lots can also be seen as open space that can be turned into playgrounds, pocket parks, and farmers’ markets with volunteer labor that in itself provides a neighborhood community-building opportunity. Community perception is crucial, because seeing something as an asset can make it possible to use it as one.

When should we identify community assets?

Every day. But here are some situations when it’s especially desirable to do so:

• When you are conducting a community assessment and need to find assets to mobilize to address community needs.
• When the community includes talented and experienced citizens whose skills are valuable but underutilized.
• When you can’t provide traditional services, even if you wanted to, and are looking for other ways to build up the community.
• When you want to encourage residents to take pride in and responsibility for local concerns and improvements.
• When you want to strengthen existing relationships and build new ones that will promote successful community development in the future.

How do you identify community assets?

The techniques for identifying community assets aren’t very hard. You don’t need a lot of special training or expertise to do the job well.

Before you begin, though, you do need to answer some important questions. You can do this yourself, in the privacy of your own home. But we recommend strongly do so before you start. Here they are:

What is the size of the community you’re concerned with?

An entire county? Town? Neighborhood? Housing development?

The bigger the community, the more work is involved – and you might need and probably different study methods for a large community than for a small one.

What people are available to do the work?

An individual? A small group of people? A larger organization? If you’re starting out alone, it makes sense to reach out to others, get them excited about the project, and recruit them to work with you. (Unless your community is very small, identifying all or most of its assets is a big job for one person).

How much time do you have for the task or how much time can you allow?

Tonight? A week? A month? As much time as it takes?

The more time you have, the more assets you will be able to uncover.

What financial resources, if any, can you count on to support the work?

If available, resources for copying or printing and to support human resources (time) can be helpful.

What do you want to do with the results?

Will they be posted in an online directory? Contacted about an opportunity to take action? If so, what action, and how?

What comes next?

There are different approaches to identifying community assets. Each can be valid and useful. Which approach is right for you? The answer will depend in large part on your answers to the starting questions above. So, once again, answer them before you start.

But below are two basic approaches you could use in your own community. They complement each other. One of them focuses on the assets of groups — specifically, associations, organizations, and institutions. The other focuses on individual people.

Identifying the assets of groups

The central task here is to take an inventory of all the groups (associations, organizations, and institutions) that exist in your community. You want to make a list. But how do you figure out what goes on the list in the first place? Some suggestions follow:

Start the list with what you know. Write down anything that comes to mind. You can always correct your list later.

You can do this work by yourself; but it might be more useful and fun to work with others. Are there other people who could join you and make this a group project?

This is a great project for students or interns.

Use other sources of information to add to your list.

These can include:

• United Way’s 211 Information and Referral System contains information on non-profit organizations for many communities.
• Community websites. Many cities and towns have their own websites, as do other community agencies. These can not only give you information about community resources, but also give you the names of people you can contact who might know a great deal more.
• The yellow pages
• Town directories, published for your community alone.
• Lists of businesses, probably available from the chamber of commerce.
• Lists of organizations and institutions that are not generally published. For example, your local newspaper may have its own unpublished list that it could make available to you.
• Bulletin boards. Physical or virtual bulletin boards, and community-calendar type listings.
• Your friends and colleagues. They may know about other lists available. And even if they don’t, they may know of groups, organizations, and community assets that are not on anybody else’s lists.

Refine and revise your list.

You can also break your list down in several different ways: alphabetically, geographically, by function, etc.

You now have an inventory of groups and group assets in your community — the associations, organizations, and institutions that are a fundamental part of community life and that can be used for community improvement. That’s an important step.

But what do you do now?

• It’s possible to put these assets on a map. For more information on how to do this, see the heading on Mapping Community Assets, coming up.
• It’s now desirable to think about how your list (or map) of assets could be used. See the heading on Using Community Assets, toward the end of this section.

Identifying the assets of individuals

Compiling a list of key groups is one approach for identifying community assets. Another approach is to compile the assets of individuals. This can be challenging, because:

• There are many more people than groups. To survey large numbers of people will take a lot of time.
• We often don’t know people’s assets unless we ask them. Their abilities and talents are often unknown. When listing organizations, you often immediately know what that group is about. But we probably won’t know what individuals’ talents and skills are until we ask them. That takes more time.

For both these reasons, identifying individual assets often takes place over a smaller community area such as a neighborhood.

But many of the above suggestions still apply. Here’s how identifying individual community assets could be done in practice:

Answer the 5 “starting questions” previously given.

This step is the same as for studying the assets of groups.

Decide on the geographic area you want to cover.

Do you want to focus on a specific neighborhood or community? Or do you want a broad sampling of the community? Keep in mind the time and resources you have available as you make your decision.

Decide on how many people you are going to ask within that area.

Everyone? A certain fixed percentage? As many as you can find? Resolve this question in advance.

Draft some questions you want to ask that will get you the information you need.

Are you interested in skills, (“I can play the piano”), or interests (“I’d love to learn”)?

If it is skills, what kind of skills — academic, artistic, athletic, interpersonal, manual, office, organizing, parenting, vocational…? Human beings have many talents, and you probably want to narrow down your search, at least a little.

If interests, what kind as well? These too come in many and varied types.

Keep in mind:

• Why am I collecting this information?
• What do I want to use it for?

Design a method by which these questions can be asked.

For example:

• Will you mail out a survey?
• Will you (more simply) have a survey available to pick up?
• Will you go door to door?
• Will you call people on the phone?
• Will you have scheduled interviews?
• Will you meet people in groups?

Each method has its pros and cons.

Try out your questions on a sample group.

Based on their answers and their suggestions, you will probably want to make revisions. That’s a good idea, and a natural part of the process. Professional surveyors do the same thing, many times over.

Collect your data.

You’ve now got a territory to cover, some good questions that meet your needs, and a method for getting the answers. Good work. Now it’s time to put your plan into practice and collect your data.

An added bonus: When you ask people about their talents and abilities, that can also help encourage people to share them with others. So your survey may not only be identifying assets, but also promoting their use.

Mapping community assets

Once you have collected asset information, it’s often especially helpful to put it on a map. Maps are good visual aids: seeing the data right in front of you often increases your insight and understanding. There are several ways to go about this:

One mapping method is to find a large street map of your community, with few other markings. (Your local Planning Department may help here, or you can probably print one out from Google Maps or some other similar site.) Then just mark with a dot, tag, or push-pin (maybe color-coded by type) the geographic location of the groups and organizations you have found. The patterns that emerge may surprise you. You may see, for example, that certain locations have different numbers or types of associations. Those areas where few associations exist may be good targets for community development later on.

This type of mapping can also be done by computer. Software programs are available to help you do this. These programs are more flexible and sophisticated than paper-and-pushpin mapping, for with them you can create “overlays,” visually placing one category of map over another, and changing these visual patterns with the push of a button.

It’s also possible to diagram your resources on a non-literal map, but one which can more clearly show the linkages among different categories of assets.

There are a number of ways of making a non-literal map. One common one is to start with an inner circle that lists physical spaces – buildings, parks, lakes, plazas – that can be used by the community or provide community services and functions. The next circle out lists community institutions – hospitals, schools and universities, libraries, etc. A circle around that second circle might include organizations connected to those institutions or doing related work. (An adult literacy program might be formally or informally tied to educational institutions, to the library, or to major employers, for example.) The next circle out might list services, the next informal groups, and the last individuals (either specific people or the types of skills and interests you are fairly sure you’ll find in the community.) Lines might be drawn between these assets to show how they’re connected, or to show how they’re connected to the group or individuals making the map.

Other non-literal map methods might involve pictures, a photographic record, even small models of buildings and public spaces. The method really doesn’t matter as much as the goal of plotting the community’s assets in a way that makes it clear how they might interconnect, and how they can be combined to meet needs or enhance community life.

Using the community assets you have identified

Whether or not you map your assets, the next and most important step is to make sure the assets you have identified get used. There is value just in expanding your own personal awareness of what exists in your community, but by sharing your results, you can also expand the awareness of others.

The real value and payoff of identifying assets is in actions that will improve your community. You want to put your assets to work for you. If you have personal assets, such as savings, you probably don’t want to hide them under a mattress. The same applies to the assets in your community. How can we maximize their return?

We’ll itemize just a few possibilities below. Think about which might fit best for you, and what your own next steps might be:

• Community assets can be the basis for asset-based planning. Planning for community development and interventions can be based on what the community has to work with, and can include strengthening current assets and developing new ones as well as addressing problems. (John McKnight and John “Jody” Kretzmann, known as the founders of the asset-based planning movement, are also the founders and co-Directors of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern University, one of the Chicago area’s community assets.)
• You can publish the assets identified – on a town or separate website, in a community newsletter, in a community service section in the local newspaper, to name just three possibilities – and make them available to all community members. In doing so, you will stimulate public asset knowledge and use.
• You can target a particular neighborhood or other area for development, on the basis of the asset patterns you have found.
• You can use your knowledge of assets to tackle a new community project — because now you may have more resources to work on that project than you originally thought.
• You can find new ways to bring groups and organizations together, to learn about each other’s assets — and perhaps to work collaboratively on projects such as the one above.
• You can publicize these assets, and attract new businesses and other opportunities to your community. In both this example and the ones just above, you are using existing assets to create new ones. (This is what makes community work exciting!)
• You can create a school curriculum to teach local students about these assets, thus enriching their knowledge of the community and building community pride.
• You can consider creating a “community coordinator,” (or some other title), someone who would deal with assets every day. The coordinator’s new job would be to find the right assets in the community to respond to any request or community concern. Would this position pay for itself?
• You (or the new coordinator) can keep records how assets are used in the community, and use those records to generate ideas for improving asset exchange.
• You can set up structured programs for asset exchange, which can range from individual skill swaps to institutional cost-sharing.
• Community assets keep getting reviewed, perhaps on a regular basis. New assets are always coming on the scene; it’s good to keep up to date on them. By so doing, the whole asset-identification process can become a regular part of community life.

Community assets should be reviewed on a regular basis. Asset identification should be a regular part of community life, so that community assets can be taken advantage of when they’re needed.

Learn how to use qualitative methods, such as focus groups and interviews, to support and strengthen your community assessment.

• What are qualitative methods of assessment?

• Why use qualitative methods of assessment?

• When would you use qualitative methods of assessment?

• How do you use qualitative methods of assessment?

Using qualitative assessment methods rather than purely data-based information is crucial to understanding many community issues and needs. Numbers work well to show comparisons, progress, an statistics of community efforts, but they cannot express motives, opinions, feelings, or relationships. This section discusses how to use qualitative assessment methods and when to implement them into community planning.

What are qualitative methods of assessment?

Qualitative methods of assessment are ways of gathering information that yield results that can’t easily be measured by or translated into numbers. They are often used when you need the subtleties behind the numbers – the feelings, small actions, or pieces of community history that affect the current situation. They acknowledge the fact that experience is subjective – that it is filtered through the perceptions and world views of the people undergoing it – and that it’s important to understand those perceptions and world views.

There are two major scientific ways of gathering information: quantitative methods and qualitative methods. Quantitative methods are those that express their results in numbers. They tend to answer questions like “How many?” or “How much?” or “How often?” When they’re used to compare things – the results of community programs, the effects of an economic development effort, or attitudes about a community issue – they do it by subjecting all of the things or people they’re comparing to exactly the same tests or to the same questions whose answers can be translated into numbers. That way, they can compare apples to apples – everything or everyone is measured by the same standard. Quantitative measures are often demanded by policy makers; they are considered trustworthy because their results can be measured against one another, and because they leave less room for bias.

Qualitative methods don’t yield numerical results in themselves. They may involve asking people for “essay” answers about often-complex issues, or observing interactions in complex situations. When you ask a lot of people for their reactions to or explanations of a community issue, you’re likely to get a lot of different answers. When you observe a complex situation, you may see a number of different aspects of it, and a number of ways in which it could be interpreted. You’re not only not comparing apples to apples, you may be comparing apples to bulldozers or waterfalls. As a result, researchers and policymakers sometimes see qualitative methods as less accurate and less legitimate than quantitative ones. That can be true, but, as we’ll see, if qualitative methods are used with care, they can also yield reliable information.

Qualitative and quantitative methods are, in fact, complementary. Each has strengths and weaknesses that the other doesn’t, and together, they can present a clearer picture of the situation than either would alone. Often, the most accurate information is obtained when several varieties of each method are used. That’s not always possible, but when it is, it can yield the best results.

There are a number of qualitative methods that can be used in assessment of issues or community needs. We’ll list the major ones here, and look at them in more detail later in the section.

They include:

• Individual interviews. These may be structured interviews, where the questions are determined beforehand, or unstructured conversations that are allowed to range wherever the interviewee wants to go in relation to the general topic. Even in structured interviews, there may be room for both interviewers and interviewees to pursue topics that don’t relate directly to answering the original questions. The difference, however, is that in a structured interview, all those questions are formally asked, and the interviewer does her best to make sure they’re answered.
• Group interviews. These are similar to individual interviews, but involve two or more interviewees at a time, rather than one. (Sometimes, these are unexpected – the interviewee’s mother and sister are present, and insist on being part of the conversation.) Group interviews have some advantages, in that interviewees can act as a check on one another (I remember that happening in a different way…), and stimulate one another’s thinking. At the same time, the interviewer has to be somewhat of a facilitator, making sure that no one person dominates, and that everyone gets a reasonable chance to speak.

A special case of group interviewing is a focus group. This is a group of about 6-10 people, led by a trained facilitator, assembled to answer a specific question or questions. An effort is sometimes made to make sure that group members don’t know one another, so that social pressures won’t influence them. If trained facilitators are available, focus groups can be a good way to get accurate information about an issue.

• Observation. Here, someone actually goes and looks at a place or event, watches situations or interactions, or takes part in the life of the community or a population while recording what he finds as a result.
• Community or other large meetings. These meetings allow a range of people a chance to express their opinions and react to others’. They can draw on a large pool of opinions and knowledge at one time, and uncover disagreements or differences that can then be discussed.
• Interpretation of records, transcripts, etc. This can range from qualitative analysis of quantitative data (like the assumption of the researcher in the introduction to this section that people who are doing well won’t be interested in an adult education program), to using quantitative data as a jumping-off point for qualitative assessment, to case studies (detailed examinations of individual cases). The last are not always useful in assessing community issues or needs, but they can be very effective in convincing policymakers or funders of the importance of those issues and needs.

Many types of qualitative information are turned into numerical results, although not always accurately. The transformation may miss important details, or the information may simply be too complex to fit easily into numerical constraints, unless you can create a computer model or similar number-based framework that has the capacity to take in an enormous amount of variety. There are many software programs – NVivo and Atlas.ti are fairly well-known, but there are many others, including some freeware – that are intended expressly for analyzing qualitative data.

Since qualitative methods give you results that are not always easy to compare, or even to check for accuracy, people who want hard and fast evidence often see them as suspect. In fact, both quantitative and qualitative measures are important and necessary, depending on the situation. When you’re assessing community issues, as we’ve discussed, you’ll often get closest to the complete picture by using both. The problem is convincing those who need to be convinced – policymakers, funders, etc. – that your qualitative measures are reliable.

There is a debate in the research community about how to judge qualitative methods. Some say they should be evaluated by the same standards as quantitative methods. Others maintain that, because they are intrinsically different from quantitative methods, qualitative methods need a set of standards that take into account their philosophical base and the kind of information they yield.

The British government, for instance, has developed a framework for demonstrating qualitative reliability, which includes a set of 18 questions that a qualitative assessment or study should be subjected to (see Tool #1).

Guidelines that can help you argue for the reliability of your qualitative assessment include:

• Report accurately and completely. Whether you’re interviewing, observing, or engaging in some other technique, you should faithfully record such details as the time and place of your activity, who was involved, what the situation was, etc. In that way, you can see similarities and differences, and make comparisons where they’re appropriate. The recording of interviews, observations, and other information should be as accurate and nearly complete as possible (e.g., word-for-word for interviews).
• Frame the right questions, and direct them appropriately. Occasionally, it works to go fishing for information, i.e. to start without any idea of what you want to find out In most instances, however, you should know what the important questions are, and where you need to look for answers. The clearer you can be – and the clearer it is that the questions you’re asking will lead to real understanding and effective action – the more credibility your inquiry will have.
• Use qualitative methods specifically to gain information you can’t easily get from quantitative methods. You can quantify how many members of a specific minority live in a particular neighborhood. It’s much harder to quantify a clear understanding of how well they get along with their neighbors, and why.
• Use the method(s) that can best help you answer the questions you’re asking. If you want to know the state of vacant lots in a city, you’re less likely to determine it by asking people than you are by going and looking at the lots themselves. On the other hand, you usually can gain more information about people’s opinions through talking to them than you can from observation.
• Sort out your own and others’ subjective feelings and comments from objective reality, and try to make sure that your findings are objective. It’s easy to get caught up in the passion of interviewees’ opinions, or in your own response to particular conditions. If you want your findings to be reliable, you have to screen out as much of the subjective as possible from what you find and record. (One way to approach this issue is to have more than one person record and analyze each interview or observation, and then to check on how well they agree, both in their recording of the data and in their interpretation.)

Something that’s objective – an observation, statement, opinion, research finding, etc. – is based on reality as it actually is. Scientists, for instance, aim to be objective, and to understand the way things really are, rather than the way the scientists or others want them to be, or think they might be. A subjective observation, statement, opinion, or research finding, on the other hand, is based on the thoughts and assumptions of the person issuing it. A researcher may be so appalled by the conditions in neighborhoods where violence is rampant that she may begin to feel that violence is in fact the only rational response, and slant her research in that direction.

Especially in community assessment, objectivity is vitally important. Objectivity in looking at the community will help you understand how to most effectively address issues, maximize and use assets, and solve problems. Understanding your own subjective reactions – to difficult conditions, to particular individuals, to cultural practices – will help you to screen them out, thereby increasing the reliability of your findings.

Why use qualitative methods of assessment?

The basic reason to use qualitative methods is that there are some kinds of questions and some dimensions of community assessment that can be better addressed by them than by quantitative methods. The methods you use should be determined by the questions you’re asking. Since it may be hard to convince policymakers and others that qualitative methods are useful, however, why bother to use them at all? Some of the major reasons:

• They answer some questions that quantitative measures can’t. Quantitative methods may tell you how many people do a certain thing, but they’re unlikely to tell you how or why they do it. Qualitative methods can better answer the how and why questions, and also provide other information in the process.
• They connect directly with the population and the community with which you’re concerned. In assessment, the best sources of information are those closest to what’s being assessed: they experience it more than anyone else. Qualitative methods generally go directly to those sources with more complex questions than quantitative methods.
• They can get at certain underlying realities of the situation. Once again, quantitative methods often don’t answer “why?” questions, while qualitative methods can tell you about the history of the community or issue, who the significant supporters and opponents of various ideas are, whom people in the community listen to, etc. In an assessment situation, these can be crucial pieces of information.
• They can involve the population of interest, or the community at large, in helping to assess the issues and needs of the community. This participation fosters a sense of ownership and support for the efforts.
• They often allow for a deeper examination of the situation or the community than quantitative methods do. Quantitative methods, although helpful, can tend to put people or events in specific categories, ask for yes-no or multiple-choice answers, often eliminating complexity. Qualitative methods allow for following promising directions (“Why do you say that?”), and can lead to the discovery of important information that quantitative results wouldn’t have touched on.
• They allow for the human factor. While the information obtained through qualitative methods is often subjective, it is also often identified as such, and can be analyzed accordingly.

When would you use qualitative methods of assessment?

Clearly, there are times when quantitative research will give you the information you need. So when do you use qualitative methods? It depends to a great extent on the question you’re asking. (The first four situations below are based on a USAID guide to using rapid appraisal methods, Performance Monitoring and Evaluation Tips.)

• When what you need is qualitative, descriptive information. Particularly in an assessment situation, what you’re often looking for is descriptive or analytical information that has little to do with quantitative measures. The type of information provided by qualitative methods is often exactly what you’re looking for in community assessment to decide on next steps.
• When you’re trying to understand the reasons and motivations for people’s behavior, or how they operate in particular situations. Why don’t people take advantage of human service programs for which they’re eligible? What are the differences in the ways people of different cultural backgrounds respond to services? These are the kinds of questions you’re likely to want to answer in a community assessment, and they often can’t be answered quantitatively.
• When you’re analyzing quantitative data. As mentioned above, much quantitative data can be analyzed using qualitative methods.

An odd set of numbers – a community that’s decidedly low-income, but where a vast majority of people own their own homes, for instance – might be the springboard for a qualitative examination of why this is so. A number of reasons are possible:

• The community is largely elderly, and people are living in long-since-paid-for houses they bought 40 or more years ago, when their income was higher and housing was less expensive.
• One or more local banks have made it a priority to help people buy houses, and provide low-interest mortgages and other subsidy programs to further that goal.
• While they may be low-income, the members of the community nonetheless scrimp on everything else in order to put away money for a house. This is often the case among immigrants from certain cultures, where people are willing to live very simply for many years in order to save for property and education.
• The community has been “written off” because of its substandard housing, dangerous streets, and lack of services, and houses as a result are ridiculously cheap.
• A combination of factors, some of which may not be listed here.

By and large, quantitative methods won’t easily tell you the reasons for this unusual situation, but qualitative methods will.

• When you’re trying to develop suggestions and recommendations. Again, this is often the primary purpose of community assessment. How should you design a program or initiative to accomplish a major community goal or deal with an issue? What will people respond to? Qualitative data may give the best information here, or may be used in addition to qualitative information to provide a complete picture on which to base your strategy.
• When you want to involve the community in assessment as directly as possible. Involving community members directly leads to ownership and support of initiatives, and is also likely to generate the best and most effective solutions. Qualitative assessment methods, for the most part, collect information directly from community members themselves, and allow them to fill in the details as much as they can. By and large, being interviewed is more likely to leave someone feeling like part of the process than filling out a survey.
• When you’re doing community-based participatory research (i.e., involving the community directly in planning and implementing assessment). Community-based participatory research often relies greatly on qualitative assessment methods.
• When quantitative data are unavailable or unobtainable.
• When you don’t have the capacity to use quantitative methods. You may not have the proper training, the software or hardware that will make quantitative assessment useful for you, or the time to use quantitative methods properly.

How do you use qualitative methods of assessment?

Now that you’re convinced of the importance of using qualitative methods of assessment, how are you going to do it? There’s seldom one right way to do anything, but we’ll offer some steps to take in using qualitative methods, including some guidelines for doing interviews and observations, the two most common methods. (Most of these guidelines hold equally for using quantitative methods as well.)

Start by deciding what it is you want to know.

You may remember that this is also one of the guidelines for qualitative reliability. It may seem elementary, but it doesn’t happen anywhere near as often as it ought to. The importance of deciding what you want to know is that it determines the character of your assessment – what kinds of questions you ask, whom you ask them of, how you’ll go about it, etc. Without that minimal amount of structure, you’re likely to wind up with a confused and unorganized mass of information.

There are many ways to approach a community assessment, and, consequently, many questions you might choose to start your assessment with. You might even use more than one, but it’s important to be clear about exactly what you’re looking for.

Some possibilities:

• What is the most serious issue – either general or specific – the community faces (i.e., what should we turn our attention to?
• What services are most needed in the community? Who most needs them?
• Are people taking advantage of services that currently exist?
• What are the community’s significant assets? How can they be strengthened?
• Are there forces working against the good of the community that should be opposed? (You probably wouldn’t be asking this question unless you thought there were, and had some idea who or what they might be.)
• Who ought to be involved in a prospective coalition or initiative?

Choose the method best suited to finding the information you’re looking for.

If you want to learn about people’s public behavior, you would probably use direct observation. Observing mothers and children in a clinic waiting room, for example, might give you information about the mothers’ anxiety levels or child-rearing practices.

If you want to know people’s opinions or how they feel about issues, some type of interview would be appropriate.

Once you’ve chosen the right method, it’s important to carry it out properly. Be aware of what you can do with the resources you have. You can’t conduct thousands of interviews in a large city, for instance, without considerable money. If you’re a cash-strapped nonprofit, you might look for a grant to fund your interviews, or you might confine your assessment to one neighborhood. Perhaps you’d mobilize volunteers to conduct interviews, or interview groups rather than individuals. It’s better to do a limited community assessment well than a large one badly.

In choosing your method, be aware also that, in some cases, quantitative methods may be more appropriate and more likely to tell you what you want to know.

Choose the people who will gather the information, and, if necessary, train them.

With qualitative methods, where contact is often personal, the question of who carries them out can be very important. Academics or others who are perceived by community members as “the other,” whether because of their behavior, their speech, or simply because they’re outsiders, may find it hard to gather accurate and complete information from a population that’s very conscious of class or cultural differences. Often, it makes more sense to train members of the population or others who are known and trusted by – or at least familiar to, in their behavior, dress, and speech –those who are being asked to contribute their opinions and observations.

Data collectors should be fluent in the language and culture of those they are interviewing. If you’re assessing commercial activity in a Hispanic neighborhood, you’ll miss most of what’s really happening unless you understand both the Spanish language and the normal ways in which Hispanic (or Dominican or Mexican or Puerto Rican) customers and merchants relate to one another.

If you recruit members of the community or of a specific population to do qualitative information gathering – because they relate to the population better, because they speak the language, because you’re engaged in a participatory effort, or simply because you think they’ll be good at it – you should provide them with training to make sure that the results they come up with are reliable. Depending on what kinds of methods they’ll be using, some of the elements of a training might be:

• What to record and how: It may not be obvious how important it is to record the time, place, details, and circumstances of an interview, observation, focus group, or larger meeting It may also be necessary, depending on a trainee’s experience, to learn to use a recorder or video camera, and/or to learn how to take efficient notes without losing the thread of the conversation or missing important points in an observation.
• Interview techniques, as well as exactly what purpose an interview serves, and how it fits into the larger assessment picture. The more clearly an interviewer understands not just what to do and how, but why she’s doing it, the better she’s likely to be at drawing out the information she’s seeking.
• Observation techniques: As with an interview, an observation will be far more useful if the observer understands not just what to do and how to do it, but exactly why he’s doing it, and how it will be used.
• Training in other methods: Focus groups, for instance, require specific skills and techniques.
• Training in how to think of themselves as researchers: Like those engaged in community-based participatory research, information gatherers should understand how researchers operate. Objectivity, attention to detail, curiosity, and the continuous processing of information in order to generate the next question or observation are all part of the investigative mindset, which they should be encouraged to develop.

Determine from whom or from where you need to gather information.

It may be that you want to hear from all sectors of the community, but some issues or circumstances demand more specific informants. Some possible interview subjects may be public officials, members of a specific population or cultural group, people from a particular geographic area, or people with certain characteristics (parents of young children, individuals with disabilities, males 18-24, people with high blood pressure).

Knowing whom you need to ask extends to any method in which you talk directly to people – focus groups, large community meetings, etc. Focus groups used by marketers are chosen extremely carefully, for example, with age, gender, income, place of residence, and even such factors as favored leisure activities considered.

Observation may or may not involve people. If it does, the question may not be whom you want to observe, but rather what activity or situation you want to observe. If it’s general – what kinds of street activity take place in various neighborhoods, how people use a public park – it’s not necessary to focus on a particular population, but rather on the place. If it’s more specific – back to commercial activity in that Hispanic neighborhood – you’ll need to be in the right place at the right time.

Gather the information.

Now it’s time for you or the people you’ve chosen to go out and collect the qualitative information you need.

Interviews

As mentioned above, interviews can be structured or unstructured. In a strictly structured interview, the same questions in the same order are asked of everyone, with relatively little room for wandering off the specific topic. Semi-structured interviews may also be based on a list of specific questions, but – while trying to make sure that the interviewee answers all of them – the interviewer may pursue interesting avenues, or encourage the interviewee to talk about other related issues. An unstructured interview is likely to be more relaxed – more like a conversation than a formal interview.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach. A structured interview may make the interviewee focus in on the questions and the interview process, take it more seriously, and thus provide excellent information. Because everyone is interviewed in the same way, a structured interview may be – or at least may look – reliable. It may also make an interviewee nervous, emphasize the differences between him and the interviewer, and lead to incomplete or less-than-truthful answers.

A semi- or unstructured interview may allow the interviewee to be more relaxed, and thus more forthcoming. It also leaves room for pursuing a topic that’s not directly related to the formal list of questions, but that might be important or even crucial. At the same time, because it can be far-ranging, a semi- or unstructured interview – particularly one that doesn’t start with a list of questions – is, or appears, less reliable than a structured one. It also, in the hands of an inexperienced or indecisive interviewer, may allow an interviewee to get sidetracked and never get back to the original questions.

What kind of interview you use depends on the nature of the information you’re looking for, the needs of the people you’re interviewing (e.g., whether comfort is more important than structure), and your own comfort. The author has conducted all three types of interviews, and has found that semi-structured interviews – having clear questions and goals for the interview, but conducting it in an informal way, with room for pursuing tangents and some simple friendly conversation – is generally productive. The following guidelines for interviewing reflect that view.

• Ask the interviewee to choose the space. You might give him a range of suggestions – his home or workplace, the office of a human service agency, a neutral space, such as a café or a park – and go with his choice. The more comfortable he is, the better and more informative the interview is likely to be.
• Choose your clothes for the comfort of the interviewee. In general, your clothes and hers should be similar: if she’s in jeans and a t-shirt, you shouldn’t be in a suit; if you’re interviewing a business executive at her office, you should be wearing a suit. Clothes send powerful messages, and the message you should be sending here is “We’re from the same planet; you can talk to me.”
• Talk beforehand with the interviewee if you’re planning to record or photograph the interview. Get permission before you show up with equipment It’s common courtesy, and it’s less likely to start the interview off awkwardly.

If the results of the interview are likely to be published, even if the interviewee will be anonymous, you might want to get a signed “informed consent” form, indicating that the interviewee understands the purpose of the interview, and gives permission for the material to be published or used in other ways.

• Record carefully the time, place, circumstances, and details of the interview. This includes a description of the location (the neighborhood as well as the space, if you’re interviewing a community member), other people present, any distractions (kids, pets, TV), other factors influencing the interview or the situation. Include a general description of the interviewee (married Hispanic woman, age 25, three children aged 6, 4, and 1).
• Think out and frame your questions carefully, and ask directly for the information you’re seeking. Memorize your basic questions (not necessarily word-for-word, but know what they are), so that you refer to notes as little as possible. Make your questions clear and unambiguous, so that questions aren’t vague or difficult to understand.
• Ask open-ended questions. These are questions that require an “essay” answer, rather than a yes-no response. For example, instead of asking “Did you enjoy being in the program?” you might ask “What was participating in the program like?” Try to give people the chance to answer as fully and thoughtfully as possible.
• Probe. Ask follow-up questions to get at what people are really saying, or to keep them talking about a topic. (“Why did you like it when the teacher asked your opinion?”) Don’t be afraid to pursue what may seem to be a sidetrack. Sometimes the best or most important information lies off the beaten path.

Some interviewees can manage one-word answers to nearly any question. They might answer “What was participating in the program like?” with “Good.” Don’t be afraid to probe these answers. “What does that mean?” or “How was it good?” might get you a flood of information. If it gets you another one-word answer, keep probing, unless you sense that the person is getting angry or frustrated. Then it’s probably time to move on to the next question, and hope that there’ll be an opportunity to return to this one for a fuller explanation. But be aware that some people are simply quieter – or less reflective – than others. You may never get much more than one-word answers from them.

• Don’t cut people off too quickly. Their stories, or what you can read between the lines, may give you information as important as what they tell you directly.

At the same time, be aware when they’ve strayed too far from the topic. There’s a Mark Twain story that consists of the voice of a man telling an anecdote about a three-legged dog. Every other word reminds him of something else – another story – and he gets continually sidetracked, never finishing the story of the dog, or any of the others, either. Beware the Curse of the Three-Legged Dog: gently but firmly direct people back to the topic if they get too far afield.

• Confirm what you’re told by checking with others to the extent that you can. Remember that you’re getting people’s perceptions, which aren’t always the same as objective reality. In Rashomon, a film by the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, an incident is described from the perspectives of four participants, each of whom sees it totally differently. In fact, the phenomenon of Rashomon lurks everywhere; get everyone’s side of the story.

Group interviews are both similar to and different from individual ones. The basic guidelines – being clear what you’re asking, open-ended questions, probing, etc. – still hold, but the group brings its own dynamic to the situation. The interview becomes more of a group discussion, and the interviewer’s concerns must extend to making sure that everyone gets heard, reining in individuals who dominate the discussion, and keeping the focus on ideas and information, rather than personalities.

As with other methods, group interviews have advantages and disadvantages. The former include using the energy of the group to generate more information than might otherwise be forthcoming. Members may stimulate one another to come up with more and more useful material, as their thinking is prodded by the memories and conclusions of others. They can also act as a check on the accuracy of the information provided. In addition, the presence of other, often familiar, interviewees may help to break down shyness or nervousness, and create a relaxed atmosphere in which everyone feels comfortable talking. (The skills of the interviewer at making people comfortable – at least partially by being comfortable herself – are important here.)

With these potential positives come the possible negatives of conflict, antagonism, or dislike among group members, as well as other negative feelings or history that can disrupt or twist discussion and make an interview all but useless. There are also problems that can arise from members of the group being too friendly: they may spend too much time in chit-chat, and have trouble focusing on the questions at hand.

Group interviews may be useful when resources – and, as a result, interviewers – are limited, or when there are a large number of people who should be, or would like to be, interviewed. Groups probably shouldn’t be much larger than five or six, and interviewers should have, or be trained in, basic group facilitation skills.

Observation

What do we mean by “observation?” For our purposes, there are essentially two kinds: direct and participant observation.

Direct observation is the practice of examining or watching places, people, or activity without interfering or taking part in what’s going on. The observer is the proverbial fly on the wall, often unidentified, who does nothing but watch and record what she sees and/or hears. A direct observation to see how people use a public park, for instance, might consist of one or more observers simply sitting in one place or walking around the park for several hours, or even several days. Observers might come back at different times of day, on different days, or at different times of year, in order to understand as much as possible of what goes on in the park. They might occasionally ask questions of people using the park, but in as low-key and unobtrusive a way as possible, not identifying themselves as researchers.

Some kinds of direct observation – those where people are observed in situations they think are private – have the potential of violating privacy. In these instances, ethics generally demands that the observer obtain the permission of those being observed.

In laboratory schools, for instance, where teachers are trained and new educational ideas tested, classes are often observed from behind one-way mirrors. In such cases, both the teachers and the parents of the students are generally informed that such observation may happen, and are asked to sign consent forms. They don’t know exactly when observation is taking place, but they understand that it’s part of the laboratory school environment, and are willing to allow it in order both to improve individual teachers’ skills and to foster the development of better educational methods.

Participant observation involves becoming to some extent part of the life of the people you’re observing – learning and taking part in their culture, their celebrations and rituals, and their everyday activities. A participant observer in the park above might introduce himself into the activities he observes – a regular volleyball game, winter cross-country skiing, dog walking, in-line skating – and get to know well the people who engage in those activities. He would also monitor his own feelings and reactions to using the park, in order to better understand how its users feel about it. He would probably ask lots of questions, and might well identify himself as a researcher.

An effective participant observer may take a long time (in some cases, years) to establish himself in this way. There are exceptions to this rule, of course. Some marketing firms and corporations employ trend-spotters as participant observers. Young, hip, and stylish themselves, these observers are able to identify and mingle with adolescent and young adult trend-setters in brief interactions, and determine what products, styles, and behaviors are likely to catch on soon with young people in general. You may able to do something similar, but it helps greatly if you’re already part of the group that you’re interested in observing, or if the group, like public park users, can include anyone.

Both direct and participant observation can be useful in community assessment. A participant observer in that situation is likely to be a member of the group being observed, because of the length of time it can take to establish an outsider as a participant observer. Direct observation is probably more common as an assessment tool.

Regardless of its type, your observation should be conducted so as to be reliable.

Some guidelines for reaching that goal:

• Think carefully about the questions you want your observation to answer. You may be looking at people’s behavior or interactions in a given place or situation, or the nature of social, physical, or environmental conditions in a particular place or circumstance. If you’re clear about what you want to find out, you can structure your observation to get the best information.
• Where and whom should you observe to answer these questions? You wouldn’t normally look for evidence of homelessness in the wealthiest neighborhood in town, nor would you observe the residents of an Asian neighborhood to find out something about the Hispanic population.
• When and for how long should observation take place? Observing commercial activity downtown on Sunday morning won’t get you a very accurate picture of what it’s actually like. You’d need to observe at both busy and slow times, and over a period of time, to get a real idea of the amount, intensity, and character of commercial activity.

What should you observe and record? That depends on the questions you’re trying to answer, but some basics include:

• The physical characteristics of the setting(s), including weather, if outdoors.
• The time of day, week, and year.
• A description (age, race/ethnicity, gender, clothing style, etc.) of any people involved.
  

  Clothing reflects the way people choose to present themselves to the world. A mohawk haircut, piercings, and black clothes represent an attitude and, to some extent, a world view, not just a fashion statement. The same is true for an expensive suit, or for an outfit of jeans, wool shirt, and hiking boots. Paying attention to such details can increase both your understanding and the reliability of your observation.

• The activities, events, and/or places or circumstances observed, and a description of each.
• The nature of interactions among people.
• People’s apparent attitudes toward a place, situation, activity, or event – positive or negative, happy, confused, angry, disappointed, etc.
• The physical and social (unobserved, detached, participant, etc.) position of the observer.
  

  At a neighborhood festival, for instance, an observer could be watching from a window high above the street, from a position just at the edge of the crowd, from within the crowd and the festival goings-on, as a participant in a festival activity, or even as a festival volunteer or organizer. What she would see and hear, what she would experience, and the information she would obtain would be different from each of these viewpoints.

• The observer’s own responses and attitudes, including the physical and psychological comfort of the observation. This should be separate from the recording of the observation itself, and, in the ideal, should not influence the objective recording of what was observed.

How do you record observations? That depends on the nature of the observation and on your resources. Video recording, unless it’s done from a concealed spot, or in a situation where such recording is expected (a tourist site, or that street festival, for example), can change people’s behavior or put the observer under some suspicion. Audio recording is much less obvious, but also provides less information, unless it’s specifically sound information that you’re seeking. In most cases, recording would be done with a notebook and pencil or with a laptop computer. If recording during the observation would be disruptive or out of place, you’d probably wait till after you had left the situation – but as soon after as possible, so as not to forget or confuse details.

Analyze the information.

Once you’ve gathered information by whatever qualitative method, you have to figure out what it tells you. Some of that will be obvious: if you’ve been interested in who uses that public park we were talking about earlier, and your observation tells you that it’s mostly young people, you have an answer to your initial question. Your next questions may be why other groups don’t use the park as much, and whether the fact that it’s largely used by young people keeps others away. When you’ve answered those questions, you may have generated others, or you may have a basis for planning a campaign to get more people using the park.

Make and carry out a plan to address the issue or problem you’ve identified or were concerned with.

The final step here is to use the information and analysis that came from your use of qualitative methods to change the community for the better. All the assessment in the world is useless if it doesn’t lead to some action that’s meant to create positive change.

In Summary

Qualitative methods of gathering information – methods such as interviews, observation, focus groups, and community meetings that don’t always yield results that can be reduced to numbers, or that are used to capture a level of information difficult to get with quantitative methods – are often extremely useful in community assessment, especially when used together with quantitative methods, which do give numerical results. Qualitative methods can get at the things that numbers don’t, such as the reasons for people’s actions, or community history. They can help to identify community issues and needs, and provide a basis for planning community efforts that lead to long-term change.