Samantha Abbato (Visual Insights People), Margi MacGregor (CatholicCare NT), Jayne LLoyd (CatholicCare NT)Story is a valuable tool for evaluation that receives cursory attention in the evaluation literature compared to other qualitative methodologies. Krueger (2010) calls attention to the value of evaluation stories because they make information easier to remember, more believable and can convey emotion to elicit action. Many organisations in the community and health sectors are regularly required to provide participant stories as a component of regular reporting. But scant attention has been given to how to build rigor and credibility into this evaluation approach. In addition, the last decade has seen rapid innovation in technology to tell stories in engaging visual ways through film and virtual reality that is becoming ever more accessible to all of us, evaluators, commissioning organisations and staff and the people our programs are designed to serve.
Through a multidisciplinary partnership bringing film, art, graphic design and virtual reality to evaluation, we disrupt the traditional way of developing evaluation story. We present examples of evaluation story developed through using three approaches beyond the box of evaluation.
- Film story based on accessible technologies (i-pads, i-phones and smart phones) in-depth interview, and a participant led approach;
- Aboriginal art telling the stories of client participation in programs painted in partnership with clients;
- Virtual reality animation based on storyboards codesigned with program participants.
These different modes of evaluation story telling facilitated by the transdisciplinary team have been combined in an approach and used for a range of evaluation projects. A major advantage of the approach is that the visual media enables a diversity of participants to engage, create, narrate, shape, communicate and validate their own stories to the audience of evaluation without limitation of language and literacy. We discuss how regardless of how innovative and creative the story-telling media, rigor and credibility of story as data can be maintained and risks mitigated.
