title: What counts? For whom?: Cultural beacons and unexpected areas of programmatic impact.
abstract: The present article was motivated by our observations that (1) current methods for gathering data do not wholly capture program-related transformations, and (2) grassroots ways of knowing yield legitimate data and can enrich programmatic efforts and evaluations. Accordingly, our work seeks to leverage grassroots knowledge in order to both recognize and respect cultural beacons (CBs) - culturally embedded, user-defined aids for understanding program-related change. Simply, these inductively gathered, locally identified CBs illuminate what to measure and/or how to measure it. Our analysis of participatory evaluations from four international, social change interventions offers four sites for detecting CBs: material possessions, community landscape features, social behaviors, and community-inspired art. We examine the methodological and relational contexts that facilitate CB discovery, discuss unexpected areas of programmatic impact, and utilize lessons learned across projects to make suggestions for continued exploration of CBs in monitoring and evaluation design and practice.
authors.affiliation: Department of English, The University of Texas at El Paso, USA. Electronic address: ldura@utep.edu.
authors.forename: Lucía
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Durá
authors.affiliation: Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, USA. Electronic address: felt@usc.edu.
authors.forename: Laurel J
authors.initials: LJ
authors.lastname: Felt
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication, The University of Texas at El Paso, USA. Electronic address: asinghal@utep.edu.
authors.forename: Arvind
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Singhal
mesh_terms: D000884:Anthropology, Cultural / Q000379:methods*; D001154:Art; D003415:Crime / Q000523:psychology*; D003466:Cultural Characteristics; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D008297:Male; D010781:Photography; D016730:Program Development / Q000379:methods / Q000592:standards; D015397:Program Evaluation / Q000379:methods / Q000592:standards; D012675:Senegal; D012922:Social Change; D061108:Social Media; D057545:Social Stigma; D040921:Stress Disorders, Traumatic / Q000523:psychology*; D014454:Uganda; D014857:Warfare; D014933:Women's Rights / Q000639:trends*
keywords: Assessment; Community stakeholders; Cultural beacons; Deductive; Evaluation; Grassroots epistemologies; Inductive; Non-textocentric; Participatory; Tacit knowledge