Try This: Roll The Dice
Last month I shared The World Cafe as an activity you can use to engage participants outside of traditional means of collecting data. Today, let’s look at one activity you can use to guide participants in making sense of it all and drawing their own conclusions.
“Rolling the dice” usually means “let’s see what happens”. For this activity, it takes on a whole new meaning.
(Though technically, “making sense of it all and drawing your own conclusions” could also mean “seeing what happens”, but humor me for a bit.)
Here’s what you need
- Two boxes that are roughly the same size
- 12 sheets of paper
- A marker
- Tape
- Tape recorder
Ways to use this activity
I’ve used this activity in two ways: facilitating focus groups and data interpretation meetings.
Focus groups are generally used to gather feedback, and I’ve been asked to facilitate them as part of a program’s evaluation. In this context, each side of the die represents an evaluation question posed to the focus group.
In the context of a data interpretation meeting (also known as a “data party”), each side of the die either illustrates a piece of quantitive data (such as percentages from a survey or a report connected to the evaluation) or a piece of qualitative data (such as themes identified and coded from transcribing responses from a focus group). In simplest terms, coding identifies themes occurring across focus groups, informant interviews, observation notes, etc. With coding you can identify overarching themes as well as themes specific to the group or people in question, and this can be illustrated as a quote, percentage, etc.
Let’s create our dice
- Take one sheet of paper
- For a focus group: Write out an evaluation question you want to pose to the group
- For a data party: Write out a theme you coded
- tape the sheet of paper to one side of a die
- Repeat for each side until all sides are covered
And that’s it.
