Indicator bank is intended to serve as a living document, a repository of indicators, that can be shaped and used as a springboard for developing context-specific PVE indicators. The indicator bank is available here.
Why use it? To stimulate thinking around the types of indicators needed to track change in a PVE programme.
This tool is useful during design, implementation and at the evaluation and learning stage. It can be used together with:
1.1 Understanding the VE challenge
1.4 Prioritisation of factors
2.2 Articulating change
4.3 Prioritising indicators
5.4 Outcome harvesting
- Understand the indicator before you use it. Do the assumptions hold true in your programme? Are the risks more relevant in your context? By using an indicator, you endorse its methodology and normative assumptions. Clarifying the definition of what you are measuring will help you refine your indicator.
- Use a range of indicators. Using ‘baskets’ of indicators can mitigate against assessments that may not reflect reality. Be sure to understand the theoretical constructs each indicator is measuring enough to find a right balance of indicators.
- Triangulate. Using different means of verification such as data triangulation (time, space, and persons) and methodological triangulation (interviews, surveys and documents) can enrich explanatory value and mitigate against bias.
- Recognise relativity of design hierarchies in indicators.One project’s outputs can be another project’s inputs. The same can apply to outcomes and goals, or impact, although to a lesser degree as the type of change moves closer to impact. How to classify depends on scope, focus, capacity and interest.
- Framing indicators define the programmatic domain and illustrate the nature of change that may be occurring, but don’t measure specific change. They rely on more tangible indicators of change often at the project level.
- Not all the assumptions that correlate indicators to their respective objectives are articulated in the bank. Relatedly, not all risks are included in the risk/ challenge column.
- Sensitivity of indicators. Some indicators may not be responsive to the degree of change suited for your programme timeframes. You may need to consider fine-tuning indicators to be more sensitive to change based on the needs of the project.
A Hundred Questions on Violence (#100QV) is a campaign launched by I-Dare for Sustainable Development (I-Dare) in 2017 with a series of videos talking about violence
in the format of questions. In 2018, the campaign added another element highlighting the concept of "Youth Agency" among youth 18-30 years old. The online campaign
takes Facebook as the main platform in addition to other online outlets, is bilingual and it targets a wide range of audiences in Jordan and beyond. Moreover,
I-Dare created the Alternative Narratives Knowledge Hub which is an online platform to create and to enrich the culture of having a "Positive Discourse" or what
I-Dare calls an alternative narrative approach towards violent and hateful content and is aimed at promoting positive content, creating and encouraging dialogue,
providing contextual information, and stimulating critical and analytical thinking among its readers and contributors.
The project's ultimate indicator for success is prevention of the engagement of youth in violent extremism through strengthening community resilience and fostering youth agency. Watch this video for recommendations for local interventions in order to prevent violent extremism: https://goo.gl/4BqfU9.
For measurement of impact, I-Dare focused on identifying interim measures of success, including: level of understanding/knowledge on hijacked religious and media concepts; level and quality of engagement of youth in the programme (numver, frequency, participation); online engagement (posts, blogs, video, online discourse); and overall change in attitudes.
Success measures were monitored through pre- and post-testing of participants (understanding and knowledge), activity reports including attendance monitoring data, statistics and qualitative analysis of online engagement and in-depth interviews with participants to understand relationships, peer networks and influences and verify changes in attitudes and behaviours.
It is difficult to test the causal link between attitude and behaviour changes and actual recruitment. However, through developing a theory which identifies change milestones (interim success measures), the programme can track progress and contribution to the PVE goal.