114 - Adapting the Listening Guide to Program Evaluation: Experiments with AI

Abstract Information: 
In this poster I present two discrete projects, both of which draw upon the Listening Guide as a feminist, narrative, reflexive method with an explicitly sociological and feminist epistemological focus. The projects extend the method into program evaluation, academic in the first instance, and applied in the second. In the first example, I describe adapting the Listening Guide for use with clinical case notes in an economic mobility social service intervention for a community of recent immigrants. The discussion focuses on the methodological implications, possibilities, and limitations of applying the Listening Guide to a data set intended to promote collaboration, system integration, and funder reporting, rather than empirical research. In the second example, I explore how the Listening Guide method can be adapted to a feasible scale for applied program evaluation through the strategic use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools. I propose that Listenings/ I-Poems can serve as evidence of disposition change and can usefully supplement and triangulate survey data in outcome evaluation. Integrated into each of these sections I offer reflections on both projects, including project types, characteristics of data sets, intervention contexts, and use cases that lend themselves well to this work.