Wandersman Center
  • Home
  • Blog
  • PODCASTS
  • Our Team
    • The Mission
    • The Team
    • The Faculty
  • Our Approach
    • Defining Readiness
    • Using Readiness
    • Studying Readiness
    • Getting To Outcomes
  • Our Services
    • What We Do
    • Partners and Projects
  • Learn More

Finding the "Critical Moments": Using Reflection in Evaluation

8/2/2019

2 Comments

 
Picture
The great Paul Howard of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and I wrote this a few months ago to talk about our use of the Critical Moments Methodology for the American Evaluation Association's Community Psychology week. In the hustle and bustle, I neglected to cross post here. So enjoy!

Community psychology puts a strong emphasis on participation and inclusion in all stages of a project; from design to implementation to evaluation. Naturally, those who identify as community psychologist gravitate to participatory and Empowerment Evaluation methods.

Spreading Community Accelerators for Learning and Evaluation (SCALE), a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded, IHI-convened initiative, aimed to help healthy community coalitions develop readiness to transform how they approached health improvement projects. There was A LOT of data, and it was sometimes hard to know how to make sense of it. Because SCALE was a formative evaluation, we needed a process to delve deeply into emerging results on an ongoing basis.

To do so, we had periodic “Critical Moment” Sessions. The Critical Moment method uses a structured narrative approach in which the evaluator poses questions to elicit participant emotions, reactions, and beliefs on topics of interest. Reflective activities that involve stakeholders can be used contextualize the ongoing narrative of a project and ascribe meaning to experiences (e.g., What has been the most memorable moment or experience on this project? What about it made the moment so memorable? How did the moment affect you?)
​

We conducted these in group settings to allow all relevant stakeholders (implementation team, funder, and community representatives) the opportunity to process together. First, we sent out an “inquiry” question to participants ahead of time, which we then synthesized and grouped all responses. We shared this grouping during the session (see visual below; yup, it is crowded, there were many comments!)
Picture
After allowing everyone to voice what they thought were the key moments, we held a voting process to focus discussion around 2-3 moments to explore in more depth.

This general process was very successful, so much so that we conducted over ten critical sessions over the course of the 4-year project. Further, many community participants adopted these methods in their settings. The process tapped into the spirit of community psychology, putting the meaning-making into the hands of the people tasks with making program changes.
​
Check out this online paper from MIT understand and dive into this powerful tool. http://web.mit.edu/cil/web_scripts/www/Critical%20Moments%20Methodology%20Brief%20CoLab.pdf
2 Comments
Stephanie Burch link
5/26/2022 03:05:01 am

Good sharee

Reply
Teknik Elektro link
4/24/2025 11:11:06 pm

How many critical sessions were conducted over the course of the project? Visit us <a href="https://it.telkomuniversity.ac.id/peran-big-data-dalam-mendeteksi-penipuan-transaksi-keuangan/">IT Telkom</a>

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Categories

    All
    Available Tools
    Department Of Defense
    News & Events
    SCALE
    Serve & Connect

    Archives

    October 2024
    September 2023
    January 2023
    November 2022
    June 2022
    August 2021
    May 2021
    October 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018

    RSS Feed

Wandersman Center

Picture

Contact Us

    Message us! 

Submit
"At some point, we just have to roll up our sleeves and do something different. 

That's what readiness provides. It's the something that makes implementation a bit better."

Dr. Brittany Cook
VP of Education and Human Development
  • Home
  • Blog
  • PODCASTS
  • Our Team
    • The Mission
    • The Team
    • The Faculty
  • Our Approach
    • Defining Readiness
    • Using Readiness
    • Studying Readiness
    • Getting To Outcomes
  • Our Services
    • What We Do
    • Partners and Projects
  • Learn More