Participatory appraisal
Practical Action
• Reversal of learning – to learn from local people, directly, on site, face-to-face, gaining
from local physical, technical and social knowledge, rather than the outsider coming in
to teach.
• Learning rapidly and progressively – with conscious exploration, flexible use of methods,
opportunism, improvisation, iteration and cross-checking. An adaptable learning process.
• Offsetting biases – facilitators must not be biased in their views or have any pre-
conceived ideas. Such biases may be ingrained culturally in an outsider, but these can
sought to be offset by being relaxed, not rushing, listening not lecturing, probing not
passing on to the next topic, be unimposing, seek out all representatives of society to
learn their concerns and priorities.
• Optimising trade-offs –the costs of learning must be related to the useful truth of
information, with tradeoffs between quantity, relevance, accuracy and timeliness.
• Triangulation – by seeking variability instead of averages to maximise the diversity and
richness of information. For example by combining data from various sources and
methodologies going beyond cross-checking to seek out contradictions and anomalies in
order to reinforce the accuracy of the data gathered.
(Adapted from Chambers 1992)
Methods
PA methods often include semi-structured interviews with local community members and group
discussions which enable specific activities to be conducted and questions to be answered.
These exercises are designed to capture the perceptions of the community and rely on informal,
oral communication methods, to put the respondents at ease, make the best use of visualisation
techniques and diagrams in order to encourage maximum participation from all residents
including the illiterate. Such group discussions aim to draw further information from residents
that might not be shared during a one-on-one interview. Data from various sources such as
interviews, group discussions and secondary data (e.g. files, reports, maps, photos) can be
triangulated to reinforce the data. Methods and techniques include the following:
• Semi-structured interviews – where the investigator asks open-ended questions.
• Group discussions – these can be casual, focussed, deliberately structured, community/
neighbourhood during which activities are often used to deliver PA techniques.
• Mapping and modelling – using the soil or paper to mark social, demographic, health,
natural resources, or 3D models of their land and environments.
• Photographs – analysed to identify conditions.
• Transect walks – systematically walking with community members through an area
observing, asking, listening, and mapping resources and findings.
• Timelines – chronologies of events can be captured orally or visually.
• Trend analysis – accounts of the past, how things have changed, cause and impacts of
changes.
• Ethno biographies – local histories can be gathered through conversations, interviews,
secondary sources.
• Seasonal diagramming – by major season or month to show weather, moisture, crops,
agricultural labour, food consumption, sickness, prices, migration, income, expenditure
etc.
• Livelihood analysis – stability, crises and coping, relative income, credit, debt etc.
• Participatory diagramming – of flows, causality, quantities, trends, relationships,
ranking, scoring, to devise diagrams e.g. systems diagrams, charts.
• Well-being or wealth ranking – identifying clusters e.g. households according to well-
being or wealth.
• Analysis of difference – e.g. by gender, social group, wealth/poverty, occupation and age.
Identifying preferences and differences between groups, contrasts and comparisons.
• Scoring and ranking – especially using matrices and seeds to compare.
• Estimates and quantification – using local measures, judgements and materials as
counters e.g. seeds, stones.
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