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Inquiry: A Participatory Approach For Understanding Stakeholder Perceptions, Matthew Militello, Christopher Janson, Drew Tonissen

The Foundation Review

This article addresses two important and elusive issues for funded projects: quantifiable measures and deep understandings of participant perceptions.

It describes the development of the InQuiry evaluation tool, which combines Q methodology (factor analysis process to quantify perceptions) with a qualitative participatory approach. InQuiry generates both quantified metrics of what participants believe about a given topic and also a rich narrative of why participants think the way they do. These data yield metrics for understanding fidelity, outcomes, and impacts.

Beginning with the history of a program funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, this article also illustrates the tool’s usefulness. The …