PEER is a specialism of
developed in collaboration with academics at Swansea University
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The PEER unit is constantly striving to innovate and refine its tools to meet the research and development needs of our partner organisations whilst remaining faithful to PEER’s principles of meaningful participation and giving voice. To this end, a new rapid version of PEER has been developed for use in programme monitoring and evaluation. Rapid PEER has been extensively field tested with 13 studies across the world to date. The method has proved successful with a range of groups, largely young people and members of vulnerable groups. These have included sexually diverse groups in Peru; young women in Dublin, Ireland; survivors of gender based violence in Bangladesh; transgender people in Tonga; and young men in Haitian immigrant communities in the Dominican Republic.
The strength of this rapid PEER approach is that the entire research process is completed within two weeks, from data collection to research write-up. The key principles of PEER are adhered to:
- Meaningful and ethical partnership and participation with the target group
- Training members of the target group to conduct interviews with their peers to collect in-depth narrative data which is then fed back to the social scientist for further analysis
- Capacity building of local staff to conduct similar research in future
- Providing staff and management with programmatically relevant and accessible findings and implications
The approach is suited to undertaking monitoring or evaluation questions, when programmes want to hear focussed feedback from members of their target groups or beneficiaries. The approach enables programmes to hear the authentic voices of the people they work with and for. PEER findings provide a complementary form of M&E alongside more traditional quantitative indicators of programme performance.
Questions that rapid PEER can approach include:
- How do people perceive/understand the programme’s communications/activities?
- What challenges does the programme face, from the beneficiary/user’s perspective?
- What do people see to be the most significant change that has occurred as a result of the programme?
PEER data also encourages the sharing of stories and examples, which represent rich case study material to illustrate the impact of programmes.
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