117 - Empathy in Evaluation from Design to Dissemination: Best Practices for Qualitative Interviews with People who have had Difficult Lived Experiences

This poster centers lessons from conducting qualitative interviews with people who have had difficult lived experiences.  The Center for Community Health and Evaluation (CCHE) will share best practices that have supported three evaluations: one involving people experiencing homelessness, another with people at risk of firearm suicide, and one with people struggling with illness and food/housing/transportation concerns. Gathering, understanding, and sharing stories of populations with adverse experiences impacts both the people being interviewed and the evaluation team. We suggest a trauma-informed evaluation approach that centers equity and respect for people.

Our evaluation team will present our considerations and lessons learned organized by evaluation phase. The design phase includes topics such as developing interview protocols with partner input and conducting an internal equity review of the plan.  The data collection phase includes supporting both the interviewee and interviewer to have the most positive experience.  Data analysis considerations involve minimizing bias and being intentional about methods to prioritize underrepresented voices.  Dissemination includes our best practices for ensuring all key partners can access our findings.

Our team welcomes conversations about others’ collective experiences, questions, and ideas for engaging equitably with sensitive topics and historically marginalized populations more broadly.  We plan to incorporate colleagues’ thoughts into an open-source checklist tool on our website (cche.org).