Community Research & Engagement Models
Community research and engagement models describe methods and structures used to involve diverse groups in consultation, feedback collection and participatory decision-making.
This category covers terms for outreach tactics, consultation formats, sampling and inclusion strategies, multilingual participation, consent and feedback mechanisms used by community-facing teams.
Action Research
Action research is a practical, collaborative approach to solving problems that combines cycles of planning, acting, observing and reflecting. It involves the people affected by the issue so research leads directly to concrete changes.
Arnstein's Ladder of Participation
Arnstein's Ladder of Participation is a model that describes levels of citizen involvement in decision-making, from nonparticipation and token consultation to genuine citizen power. It helps organisations assess whether their engagement gives communities real influence or is merely performative.
Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD)
Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) is a community-led approach that starts by identifying and mobilising local strengths—people, relationships, skills and institutions—rather than focusing first on problems and deficits. It emphasises connecting existing assets to create sustainable, locally owned solutions.
Boundary Spanning
Boundary spanning is the practice of bridging differences between groups — languages, cultures, institutions or communities — so information, needs and perspectives flow both ways. In community engagement it ensures everyone can participate and be understood, not just heard.
Citizen Science
Citizen science is the practice of involving members of the public in scientific research—collecting observations, reporting local data, or helping analyse results—to answer real-world questions. It turns community participation into usable evidence.
Cohort Engagement Model
A Cohort Engagement Model groups people into defined segments (cohorts) and runs tailored outreach, surveys and follow-ups to measure and improve participation and outcomes across those groups. It uses consistent instruments while varying timing, channels or messaging to compare results between cohorts.
Collective Impact
Collective impact is a structured approach for different organisations and stakeholders to coordinate around a shared goal, using agreed measures and a dedicated backbone to drive sustained progress. It focuses on alignment, shared data, and mutually reinforcing activities rather than isolated projects.
Community Advisory Board
A Community Advisory Board (CAB) is a group of local residents and stakeholders who advise organisations on community engagement, outreach and consultation design. CABs help ensure engagement is relevant, accessible and trusted by the people it affects.
Community Engagement Index
A Community Engagement Index (CEI) is a composite score that summarizes how well a consultation or engagement activity reaches, involves and represents different community groups. It combines measures such as participation, demographic coverage, response quality and accessibility into a single, trackable metric.
Community Mobilization
Community mobilization is the process of organising, informing and motivating people in a community to take part in a shared activity or decision — from public consultations to health campaigns. It brings people together, builds trust and increases participation so decisions or services reflect the whole community.
Community Needs Assessment
A community needs assessment is a structured process for identifying the problems, gaps and priorities of a local population so services and resources can be planned to meet real community needs. It combines data, conversation and consultation to produce a clear list of priorities and recommended actions.
Community Panel
A community panel is a pre‑recruited group of people from a defined community who agree to be contacted regularly for surveys, consultations or feedback. Panels let organisations gather ongoing, comparable input from the same mix of voices over time.
Community Pulse Survey
A short, frequent survey used to quickly measure community sentiment, needs or awareness on a specific topic. Community pulse surveys are designed to be easy to answer so organisations can track changes over time and act fast.
Community Randomized Controlled Trial (Community RCT)
A community randomized controlled trial (community RCT) randomly assigns whole communities — such as schools, neighborhoods or clinics — to different interventions or to a control, and then compares outcomes at the community level. It’s used when interventions are delivered to groups rather than individuals or when individual randomisation would cause contamination between participants.
Community Resilience Assessment
A Community Resilience Assessment evaluates a community’s ability to anticipate, withstand, adapt to and recover from shocks or stresses (like floods, economic change or health crises). It combines data on hazards, vulnerabilities and local capacities to guide planning and action.
Community Sentiment Analysis
Community Sentiment Analysis is the process of automatically assessing how a community feels about an issue, service or policy by scoring and summarising responses from surveys, consultations and open feedback. It combines automated language analysis with human review to reveal overall mood, trends and differences between groups.
Community of Practice
A community of practice is an informal group of people who share a role, interest or problem and learn together by exchanging knowledge, tools and experience. It’s a space for peers to improve how they work — not a formal team or committee.
Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR)
Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) is a collaborative approach to research in which community members and professional researchers share power across all stages of a project, from defining questions to collecting data and acting on the results. It prioritises local knowledge, mutual benefit and research that leads to practical change.
Consensus Building
Consensus building is the process of bringing a group to broad agreement on a decision or direction by listening, negotiating and adapting proposals until most people can accept them. In community engagement it prioritises inclusive participation so decisions reflect diverse views, not just the loudest or most represented voices.
Deliberative Engagement
Deliberative engagement is a structured process that gives people time, information and facilitated discussion before they form and share an opinion. It emphasises informed, reflective input over quick reactions.
Deliberative Polling
Deliberative polling is a method for measuring what the public would think after receiving balanced information and discussing an issue in small groups. It compares opinions before and after informed discussion to show how views change when people deliberate.
Delphi Method
A structured, multi‑round surveying technique that helps a group of informed participants reach a reasoned consensus by collecting anonymised feedback, sharing summary responses, and refining answers over several rounds.
Ethnographic Fieldwork
Ethnographic fieldwork is a qualitative research method where a researcher spends time within a community to observe everyday life, talk with people in context, and understand behaviours, values and meanings that shape how people respond. It prioritises direct observation and open conversation over structured questionnaires.
Focus Group
A focus group is a moderated, small-group discussion used to gather detailed, qualitative feedback about attitudes, experiences or reactions to a topic, product or proposal. It lets researchers hear how people talk about an issue and why they think that way.
Key Informant Interview
A Key Informant Interview (KII) is a one-on-one, semi‑structured interview with a person who has specialised knowledge about a community, service or issue. KIIs are used to gather detailed, contextual insights that surveys alone often miss.
Longitudinal Panel Study
A longitudinal panel study follows the same group of people (a panel) over multiple points in time to measure how their attitudes, behaviours or circumstances change. It’s used to track trends, evaluate interventions and understand individual-level change rather than a one-off snapshot.
Mixed-Methods Research
Mixed-methods research combines quantitative (numbers) and qualitative (words) approaches in the same study to answer complementary questions and give a fuller picture of a problem.
Open Space Technology
Open Space Technology is a participant-driven meeting format that lets people self-organise around the issues they care about. It creates an agenda on the day and uses simple rules to surface ideas, build conversations and produce tangible next steps.
Participant Observation
Participant observation is a qualitative research method where the researcher watches and takes part in the daily life or activities of a group to understand behaviours, context and meaning from the inside. It produces rich, contextual insights that complement surveys and other structured data collection.
Participatory Action Research (PAR)
Participatory Action Research (PAR) is a collaborative approach in which researchers and community members work together to identify problems, collect and interpret data, and take action to improve their situation. PAR is cyclical and change-focused: plan, act, observe, reflect, and repeat.
Participatory Evaluation
Participatory evaluation is an approach to assessing a program or service that actively involves the people affected by it in designing, collecting, interpreting and using evaluation information. It shifts power from external evaluators to participants so findings are more relevant, trusted and likely to be acted on.
Participatory Mapping
Participatory mapping is a collaborative method where community members draw, annotate or shape maps to record local knowledge, needs and experiences. It turns local people into the primary source of geographic information for planning, service design and advocacy.
Peer Researcher Model
A Peer Researcher Model trains and supports people from the community being studied to design, run or collect data for a research project. Peer researchers use their lived experience and relationships to reach participants who might not respond to outsiders.
Place-based Research
Place-based research investigates people, needs and behaviours within a defined geographic area — such as a neighbourhood, school catchment or town — to understand how local context shapes experiences and outcomes. It combines local knowledge, spatial data and community engagement to inform decisions tied to that place.
Randomized Encouragement Design
Randomized Encouragement Design (RED) is an experimental approach that randomises invitations or nudges (encouragements) to take up a program when you cannot directly randomise the program itself or when people may not comply. It lets you estimate the causal effect of actually using the service by comparing groups that were more or less likely to take it up.
Rapid Appraisal (Rapid Rural Appraisal)
Rapid appraisal (often called Rapid Rural Appraisal) is a fast, participatory approach for gathering practical, on-the-ground information from communities to inform decisions and program design. It uses simple, low-cost methods to generate timely, actionable insights rather than statistically representative results.
Social Network Analysis (SNA)
Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a method for mapping and measuring relationships between people, groups or organisations to reveal how information, influence and support flow through a community. It turns connections into visual maps and simple metrics that help you find key connectors, clusters and communication gaps.
Spectrum of Public Participation
The Spectrum of Public Participation describes the range of ways organisations engage people in decisions — from simply informing them to fully empowering them to shape outcomes. It helps planners choose the level of influence participants will have and design appropriate methods to match that intent.
Stakeholder Mapping
Stakeholder mapping is the process of listing and organising the people, groups and organisations affected by or able to influence a project. It shows who to engage, how important they are, and what communication or language needs they have.
World Café
World Café is a structured conversational method for large-group dialogue that produces collective ideas and shared meaning through a series of small, rotating table conversations. It’s designed to surface diverse perspectives, foster cross‑pollination of ideas and build community ownership of solutions.
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