Participatory Analysis Workshops: A Novel Method for Identifying and Exploring What Matters Across Projects

This article shares a novel theory-driven method for efficient qualitative data collection and participatory first-stage analysis suitable for diverse community-facing programs. Evaluations often explore more than one project – for example, a grants program evaluation may consider the activities of each individually funded project to understand the program as a whole. This presents a challenge in how to efficiently collect data that is relevant to each project that can be aggregated across the program, especially when projects are diverse. Efficiency is also a challenge in analysis and interpretation. Well-established evidence shows the value of participatory approaches in exploring impact and implementation. However, these approaches are also generally regarded as time- and resource-intensive. Faced with these challenges in evaluating the NSW Reconstruction Authority’s COVID-19 Community Connection and Wellbeing Program, we developed a novel method – Participatory Analysis Workshops. This method combines data collection at the outcome-level and exploration of implementation barriers and enablers with collaborative participatory data analysis to build a rich qualitative understanding of projects in a low-resource way. This article presents our method and this case example, outlining key features, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and suggesting modifications to enable other practitioners to implement it in their evaluation projects.