Can values be measured? Significant contributions from a small civil society organization through action research

Abstract

A collaborative partnership is developing a values-based indicator framework for use by civil society organizations (CSOs). A key sub-study on the relevance and usability of such indicators was carried out through an action research process with a CSO and it was found that: 1) it was, indeed, possible to develop useful and relevant indicators for the presence of CSO values; 2) it was not useful to tie each indicator to only one value; 3) the indicators were more 'universal' than the values for which they had been derived; 4) these indicators were not considered valid by the user CSO without being 'localized'; 5) the use of our values-based framework caused substantive transformational learning within this CSO. The importance of these findings to studies on values and to design issues central to formal values-based measurement work, such as face validity and catalytic validity, is drawn out. The principles of emancipatory action research used are shown to be key to the results, which themselves form foundational elements

An Unexpected Means of Embedding Ethics in Organizations: Preliminary Findings from Values-Based Evaluations

“…The action research approach used in its development, which particularly highlighted the importance of localizable proto-indicators, has been reported [34], as have several examples of its use in different organizations as an evaluation approach [5,32,33]. None of these report on the impacts of the use of the intervention, or insights of any links with business ethics and current related research gaps.…”

“…The project used an emancipatory action research approach, working with organizations and businesses engaged in providing non-formal education for sustainable development (ESD). The latter considered themselves unable to articulate "intangible" aspects of their work which they nonetheless considered key, and the work focused on co-developing an approach that could be highly localized (but also generalized and transferable to some extent) [5,[32][33][34][35] which later became known as WeValue.…”

Bringing the “Missing Pillar” into Sustainable Development Goals: Towards Intersubjective Values-Based Indicators

“…Extensive testing of the indicators was conducted in 15 organizations, each of which selected between 3 and 25 indicators to measure locally [81,83]. The feedback was used to improve the relevance/importance, validity, comprehensibility and measurability/usability of the indicators in a variety of different civil society contexts, in accordance with current recommendations for developing sustainability indicators [84].…”

“…In the second phase, exploratory field work, the peer-elicited proto-indicators were field-tested with -user‖ CSO partners acting as -critical friends‖ [81]. Extensive testing of the indicators was conducted in 15 organizations, each of which selected between 3 and 25 indicators to measure locally [81,83].…”

“…The ESDinds project, which aimed to develop values-based indicators and assessment tools for civil society organizations promoting education for sustainable development, was funded by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) from 2009-2011 [79][80][81][82][83]. The project brought together representatives of two academic research institutions and four civil society organizations (CSOs) as equal partners, and was innovative in the extent of decision-making power granted to the CSO partners within the research consortium.…”