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toolbox: community profiles

Attributed to: Julie Newton
For enquiries contact Jane French [email protected]

Version dated June 2008

1. What is the community profile
2. Conceptual rational for community profile
3. How community profiles contribute to WeD research
4. Description
5. How the community profile was developed
6. How the community profile was implemented
7. How the community profiles can be analysed
8. Links to other WeD research tools
9. Bangladesh guidelines for community profiles
10. WIDE 2 Protocols
11. Bangladesh community profiles
12. Ethiopia community profiles
13. Peru community profiles
14. Thailand Community profiles
15. Further reading

1. What is the community profile

The community profile is a detailed community study that has been carried out in each of the research communities using a range of participatory techniques including key informant interviews, observation, and secondary data. The community profiles are a systematic description of the context within which the people and processes being studied by WeD are located. They were an important stage in defining subsequent fieldwork phases. The community profiles are also ‘living documents’ that are constantly being updated and modified with additional data as the field work proceeds.

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2. Conceptual rationale for community profile

The Community Profile is mainly informed by one of WeD’s theoretical foundations: the Resource Profiles Approach.

The resource profile approach, developed in parallel to the livelihoods framework, uses the concept of resources rather than ‘capitals’. It distinguishes between five types of resources (material, human, social, cultural and natural). In particular, it seeks detailed information on the social and cultural resources that influence well-being outcomes. This provides a much richer notion of resources that recognises how they are defined in their social and cultural context. The community profiles provide information on access within the community to a wide range of resources. They also provide some indication of the prioritisation of resources that may influence how they are used.

3. How community profiles contribute to WeD research

The community profile serves the following purposes for the WeD research:

1. Provide a detailed and systematic ethnographic description of the community context within which the people and processes to be studied are immediately located. This maps the social, economic, cultural and political characteristics of the community and the distribution of resources between households within the community that is directly comparable with other communities within the country and broadly across the four countries.
2. Provide necessary background information for further detailed research within the programme (e.g. establish local terms to be used in RANQ, and frame questions for Quality of Life work). It also provides opportunities to identify sub samples of individuals and households for more detailed qualitative research.
3. Assist with building rapport between the villagers and the research teams and other involved agents.

4. Description

The community profiles did not follow a consistent format, and therefore vary across the four countries. However, they all include details on the following:

Physical description of the community (locating the site in space)
Historical background and key events (locating the site in time)
People (population and demographics), languages, religion, social settlement
Material resources (occupation, market, infrastructure, provision of government and non government services)
Natural resources and land use (water, livestock, forest, wildlife, crops)
Human resources and processes (education, migration, health)
Socio political resources (social and political groups, local institutions, social stratification)
Cultural resources (traditions and beliefs, religious and non religious events)

5. How the community profile was developed

In keeping with WeD’s ethos of methodological experimentation, a key priority in compiling community profiles was to ensure each country team sufficient flexibility.
As long as it fulfilled certain criteria (described above), each of the country teams was able to use their expertise in a range of methods (key informant interviews, participant observation, focus groups, participatory methods and secondary data) to produce the required description.

This also permitted additional data gathered from the remainder of the ongoing fieldwork to be incorporated into existing community profiles, thus making them ‘living documents’. For this reason, there was no strict grounding and piloting phase.

6. How the community profile was implemented

Each community profile was compiled and written by members of the country teams with a detailed working knowledge of each community. The range of methods used to compile the community profiles are administered in the local language by a team of researchers selected by the country teams. As is the case of all the research tools used throughout WeD, the researchers underwent intensive training using the individual country guidelines.

Throughout, care was taken to ensure that all key groups were represented covering different socio economic status, ethnicity, gender, age and religion. Findings are recorded in the local language; translation of these into English is ongoing. The implementation of the community profiles consequently involves an ongoing process of updating existing/previous community profiles.

Each of the four country teams used a different approach to the community profiles summarised below.

Bangladesh
The Bangladesh team has from the outset conceived of the community profile as a ‘living document’ that progresses as the research programme advances. For the initial reports, the teams used a mix of participatory assessment methods including:

Transect walks
Community social map
Community resource map
Wealth ranking
Wellbeing analysis
Survey/short census
Focus groups
Group discussion
Time line/ time trends
Daily activity chart
Decision making matrix
Seasonal calendar
Institutional (Venn) diagram
Semi structured interviews
Mobility map
Occupational ranking

It was found that these methods enabled the teams to involve a greater number of people from the sites where the research is being carried out. While this improved the quality and quantity of data, it also helped familiarise individuals and communities with the research. The second phase in building up the community profiles will involve adding site-specific information found in the Resources and Needs Questionnaire, the Quality of Life instrument and the in-depth, process-orientated research initiatives that are being carried out using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. These second phase profiles are currently being drafted and will be available shortly. Finally, it is anticipated that in a third iteration the team will use secondary sources to better locate each site in the wider political-economy context of Bangladesh. Research into Structures will contribute to this third phase.

Ethiopia
The first drafts of the rural Ethiopian community profiles are based on the Well-being and Illbeing Dynamics in Ethiopia (WIDE 1) research that took place in 1995 in 15 villages selected to represent the diversity of livelihoods across Ethiopia. Four of these villages are participating in the WeD research. WIDE 1 comprised a set of “Ethiopian Village Studies” edited and produced jointly by the Department of Sociology, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia and the Centre for the Study of African Economies, Oxford, UK and financed by the UK Overseas Development Administration. The fifteen villages have also been taking part in the IFPRI/CSAE Ethiopian Rural Household Survey (ERHS), which to date has collected six rounds of panel data (1994 – 2004). The first drafts of the urban profiles will be available shortly.

The community profiles for the WeD sites are currently being updated using semi-structured protocol-guided research (WIDE 2) carried out in 2003 by WeD researchers in the 15 WIDE 1 villages and in five additional sites. The wider coverage enables the Ethiopia WeD programme to situate the six sites selected for in-depth study in space and time, covering much of the country’s diversity and recent history. The WIDE 2 protocols gather data on people and society; social structures and dynamics; site history; policy regime interfaces; crises and local responses; men’s conceptions and responses to drought and famine; women’s conceptions and responses to child malnutrition, illness and death; HIV/AIDS and conflict; grounding WeD-related concepts; changes in well-being and inequality; revisiting people and society. These were carried out by a male researcher (talking to men) and a female researcher (talking to women) using the same protocol adapted to the gender of the respondent. For more detail on the protocols, see http://www.wed-ethiopia.org/wide_module_summary.htm


Peru
The Peruvian community profiles were initially based on secondary data. These have now been updated with ethnographic methods, participant observation and in-depth interviews carried out by researchers at the beginning of the research period.
It was regarded as an intrinsic component for building trust that was essential for the more qualitative research investigating the subjective and cognitive aspects of community life using the ECB ‘Entrevista a profundidad sobre Compenents del instrument'. In addition, the Peruvian team have recently included complementary data from the process research undertaken at the community level using a variety of instruments such as: seasonal calendars, inventory of social organisation and collective action, case studies of social organisation and conflict, and participant observation of festivities.

Details on the history of the site together with the cultural meaning of exchange and reciprocity of goods and services, religious spheres (traditional and modern), loyalties, trust, collective action, community identity and significance of individual and social exclusion have also been included together with more descriptive information on the sites using secondary data.


Thailand
The Thai community profiles provide a comprehensive account of the physical, cultural, economic and socio political dimensions constituting individual and community wellbeing. The approach to gathering this information differed amongst the two teams.

The team in the North East based at Khon Kaen University relied primarily on a selection of ethnographic and participatory methods similar to the Bangladesh team. These included focus groups, semi structured interviews, transect walks, seasonal calendars, time lines, flow diagrams of resources, participatory physical mapping, participatory social mapping, wealth ranking and matrix ranking for the use of various crops. The team in the South based at the Prince of Songkla University, Hat Yai used a similar strategy of key informant interviews, informal interviews with a range of informants, small group discussions, participatory mapping, and participant observation (particularly focused around special events).


A second phase community profile is currently being undertaken for each of the communities in the North East and the South incorporating data from Phase 1 QoL and from RANQ, covering the following areas: Household characteristics, social and cultural characteristics, housing, assets and wealth, land use, agriculture, and natural resources, livelihoods and occupations. It will also be augmented with a brief analysis of the possible explanations of emerging patterns drawing on the insights of fieldworkers.

7. How the community profiles can be analysed

The community profiles provide:

a) Detailed qualitative and quantitative material on each site including rich ethnographic material.
b) Considerable information that can be compared across sites within the same country
c) Some, but less comparable information across the four countries

The community profiles provide a useful starting point for highlighting ‘traces’ of what dynamics might be at play, suggesting areas for further investigation. Because the community profiles only establish basic parameters of resource distribution, need satisfaction and some subjective views and opinions within the researched communities, more in depth analysis would be needed to explore the intricacies of power relations that underpin poverty within the community. For example, they do not give information on access of all individuals to services and infrastructure within the communities. This detail is being covered by other methods used by the research team such as the RANQ and the process research.

8. Links to other WeD research tools

The community profiles play an important role in situating the households and individuals explored in RANQ within the context of the overall community. The household survey work will not capture much of the wider community level information, thus making the community profile an essential complement to the RANQ. They provide an important link to the structures work by providing some explanation for where the community is situated in relation to he wider regional and national context. Similarly, they serve to highlight potential areas of investigation for subsequent QoL work in relation to people’s perceptions of wellbeing.

9. Bangladesh guideline for community profiles

10. WIDE 2 protocol research

11. Bangladesh community profiles - click here

12. Ethiopia community profiles
WIDE 2 protocol
Ethiopian village studies links
- Dinki
- Korodegaga
- Turufe Kecheme
- Yetman
- Shashemene
- Kolfe

13. Peru community profiles
- English summary and full Spanish version
- Inventories of collective action
- Seasonal calendar for Fiestas
- ECB



14. Thailand community profiles - click here

15. Further reading
McGregor, A. & Kebede, B. (2003)“Resource profiles and the social and cultural construction of well-being, Paper to the inaugural workshop of the ESRC WeD research group (Jan 13th-17th, 2003)
McGregor, A. (2000) “A Poverty of Agency: Resource Management Amongst Poor People in Bangladesh”, Plenary Session of European Network of Bangladesh Studies, Workshop, University of Bath, April, 1998
Lawson, C., McGregor, A. Saltmarshe, K. (2000) “Surviving and Thriving: Differentiation in a peri-urban community in Northern Albania”, World Development, 28:8,


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