We help foundations, large nonprofits, social entrepreneurs, and impact investors navigate their most complex measurement challenges. Here's how we've applied StoryScience with a few of our recent partners:
We help foundations, large nonprofits, social entrepreneurs, and impact investors navigate their most complex measurement challenges. Here's how we've applied StoryScience with a few of our recent partners:
EMPOWERMENT IS NOT A 1 TO 5 SCALE
Girls For A Change (GFC) is a national organization that empowers thousands of teen girls to create and
lead social change. GFC provides girls with professional female role models, leadership training and the
inspiration to work together in teams to solve persistent societal problems in their communities. See Change
has worked with GFC – a recipient of the prestigious Draper Richards Fellowship – for five years to continuously
refine its measurement strategies, starting with the articulation of a theory of change and measurable outcome
indicators, and each year tightening our data collection strategy so that the organization can continuously reflect
and learn.Documenting the impact of a youth development initiative is a difficult job. Many other factors influence youth's daily experience besides the programs they participate in, and whether they participate in a youth program or not, youth are maturing girl's interior landscape so that she can reshape the world around her are especially hard to measure. Self-report survey is the most frequently used method in such cases, and this is the first type of data we collected for GFC, examining ways to look
for change over time. Despite the ease of using surveys, they are crude tools for detecting the power of an intervention for
young people – among other challenges, youth in programs frequently report that they're doing great on all measures at the outset
of a program, whether they are or not.
We wanted to move away from using surveys as the only data collection method for GFC, and we consistently heard from program staff and mentors that they could see and hear the change in girls over the course of the intervention. We designed a linguistic analysis study incorporating "video diaries" that may be a more valid strategy for documenting intrapersonal and behavioral changes in adolescents. After gathering video clips of participating girls speaking solo and in groups, we transcribe the footage, and a trained linguist conducts discourse analysis of the girls' speech patterns, grounded in what we know from the gender and psychology fields about how girls' ways of speaking reflect their ways of thinking. Through this project, we are recalibrating the scale used to measure GFC's impact, allowing finer and truer assessment
We wanted to move away from using surveys as the only data collection method for GFC, and we consistently heard from program staff and mentors that they could see and hear the change in girls over the course of the intervention. We designed a linguistic analysis study incorporating "video diaries" that may be a more valid strategy for documenting intrapersonal and behavioral changes in adolescents. After gathering video clips of participating girls speaking solo and in groups, we transcribe the footage, and a trained linguist conducts discourse analysis of the girls' speech patterns, grounded in what we know from the gender and psychology fields about how girls' ways of speaking reflect their ways of thinking. Through this project, we are recalibrating the scale used to measure GFC's impact, allowing finer and truer assessment
