Recent highlights
Making Sense of Child Marriage Among Syrian Refugees was led by Dr. Susan Bartels of Queen’s University. The project goal was to understand child marriage and to help Syrian family members identify feasible and culturally acceptable community-based interventions that will address early marriage. Funded by the World Bank and SVRI, story participants included unmarried and married Syrian girls; their mothers and fathers; unmarried and married Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian men; and community leaders, such as teachers and field workers. The project, done in collaboration with ABAAD Resource Center, covered the capital of Beirut, Tripoli and Beqaa Valley.
Results were presented at workshops around Lebanon to respondents and local service organizations. Details, including extensive SenseMaker results, are available in two peer-reviewed journal articles:
• Making sense of child, early and forced marriage among Syrian refugee girls: a mixed methods study in Lebanon, BMJ Global Health 3:e000509 (2018); and
• Implementation of a SenseMaker® research project among Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Global Health Action, v. 10, no. 1 (2017).
Community Health Assessment collected over 1200 micro-narratives from residents and Medicaid health plan members to understand the qualities that they admire in existing supports, places and services; improvements that could be made in their communities; where they would like more learning/education; and the habits they would like to improve.
These results are helping the CCO identify areas of focus, partnership and investment and understand issues related to health equity.
Community Impact is a sensemaking instrument designed to be used with a wide variety of participant groups, such as civic, work-related, religious, or voluntary. It can identify the strengths and weaknesses of the group, as perceived by the participants themselves. Specific goals are to understand the impact the group recognizes across such areas as relationship strength, identity, and well-being. The instrument was created by Laurie Webster (QED) and James Turk (Innovation in U). It has been employed by people as they gain experience gathering sensemaking stories and working with the resulting data. Community Value is available on the Spryng.io platform for others wanting this same learning experience.
Selected QED clients
• Davidson College, Davidson, NC
• Desert Research Institute, Reno, NV
• Dun & Bradstreet, Short Hills, NJ
• European Services Forum, Brussels, BE
• Girl Hub, London, UK
• Hoovers, Austin, TX
• Rikolto (formerly VECO), Leuven, BE
• Software & Information Industry Association and Special Library Association, Washington, DC
• The Riot Point, Toronto, ON
• University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, UK