1065: Transformative Mixed Methods Evaluation: Commitment to Equity, Community Engagement, and Shared Leadership

AEA has made a commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. This workshop combines the need to act upon that commitment through an exploration of the transformative framework that can be used to design strategies to address inequities in the world by the way they design their evaluations. Transformative mixed methods designs are explicitly constructed to serve this purpose. The transformative epistemological assumption directly focuses on challenging exiting power structures and engaging with communities in ways that are culturally responsive. This workshop is designed to teach the use mixed methods for transformative purposes to better address the needs of members of marginalized communities, such as women, people with disabilities, people living in poverty, racial/ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, and religious minorities. Participants will learn how to use a transformative lens to identify those aspects of culture and societal structures that support continued oppression and how to apply mixed methods designs to contribute to social transformation. Interactive learning strategies will be used including whole group discussion and working in small groups to apply the design of a transformative mixed methods evaluation to a case study.
My decision to propose a full day workshop on this topic is based on feedback from previous presentations at AEA and elsewhere in which participations indicated that they needed more time to apply the concepts of the transformative paradigm. (I previously presented this as a half day workshop). Given the political climate, the workshop will provide evaluators with a space to consider consequences of the changes in policy that have brought issues of racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia into the spotlight. There are other opportunities for evaluators to learn about generic mixed methods approaches but my passion and expertise is in transformative mixed methods. Mixed methods design has become more sophisticated and has developed far beyond the idea of combining focus groups with surveys. The transformative approach to mixed methods is recognized as one of the major frameworks for conducting mixed methods studies. It is the only framework that starts with the ethical assumption that our evaluation work needs to explicitly address the issues of discrimination and oppression and that we can provide a basis for transformative actions that increase justice in the world.