OUR OBJECTIVES
This Executive Summary is based on an 89-page Final Report to the Directorate General V of the Commission of the European Union. It is intended to reach a much wider audience, to be brief and concentrate on the most important aspects of the learning experience derived from this action oriented project. Unlike the Final Report, this Policy Report concentrates on general issues which benefit from but transcend individual and national experiences.
The starting point derived from a large scale comparative study sponsored by WHO which had produced detailed statistical evidence on the work of public and private non-profit organizations working with HIV/Aids. The follow up project was designed to use the previously accumulated survey data and convert it into a policy-action framework.
Unlike academic research which tends to finish with publications in specialized journals, our aim is (a least in the first place) to make the findings widely available through the network of people in the four countries who worked on our project and later through E-mail and the internet to reach a still wider audience.
OUR METHODS
To achieve this aim we assembled a group of ‘experts’, that is to say experienced professional workers in Voluntary Organizations engaged with HIV/Aids. They came from four European countries to work with the data through an Action Research method called Group Feed-back Analysis (GFA).
Group Feed-back Analysis emerged in the 1960's and has been successfully used to improve the quality of research as well as to achieve organizational learning. The method has three aims: (i) to evaluate and agree on the validity of the data, (ii) to stimulate the motivation, experience and expertise of the participants to go beyond the presented data into greater depth of understanding of the phenomena under scrutiny, (iii) to reach informed judgements on policy and action relevant outcomes.
The process of achieving these objectives is to work through Dissonance Reduction.
This is a technical term to describe problems presented in the form of conflicts and differences or lack of agreement (that is to say dissonances) with a view to achieve a degree of resolution Data collected on virtually any subject from any population shows variation. People’s judgements and values differ and these differences are the raw material for GFA and Dissonance Reduction.
We used this method through short workshop meeting between the researchers and groups of experts. There were four phases.
- Phase one was a meeting with each country team separately. The purpose was to explore the original data, the accumulated experience with HIV/Aids and any changes that had taken place since the original data was collected.
- Phase two was a meeting with the four country teams. The experience with the four separate country meeting had been summarized by the researchers and was fed back to the combined workshop for validation, comparison and further analysis. The main agreed problem areas were beginning to emerge.
- Phase three workshops were with each of the four country teams separately. Once again the material had been analyzed and summarized for feed-back. Nine Dissonances had emerged, though the degree of their importance varied by countries (see next section). The interim results of the project had been summarized for the European Union sponsor of the project and had been circulated to each member of the four teams.
- The final workshop again brought together the four country teams. The researchers’ assessment was subjected to analysis, correction were made as appropriate and detailed consideration was given to each of the dissonances to achieve reduction where possible and a superior understanding of the essential nature of the problem when dissonance reduction is not feasible.
WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED: THE DISSONANCES
Dissonances describe major problems in handling HIV/Aids issues; that is to say the prevention of the disease or the amelioration of the conditions for those who have already contracted the disease. The dissonances are identified and analyzed from the discussion between the experts in the four workshops. The exact nature of the problem would vary, but often only slightly from country to country and the similarities and differences were analyzed in the workshops during phase 2 and 3. By the final meeting in phase 4, we achieved an acceptable consolidation on most of the issues. By consolidation we mean either a Reduction of the Dissonance or a Superior Understanding of the Essence of the Problem.
One major learning experience shared between all four countries, though with different emphasis, was the extraordinary rapidity of change in circumstances and conditions from phase to phase during the two years of the project. This means that a project designed to stimulate organizational learning has to be longitudinal and would benefit from occasional follow up meetings using the same methodology.
