Tools for Finding out: Enquiry & Discovery

Anyone who wants to work with smallstock keepers in a particular area, to help them maintain and improve their livelihoods, must spend time finding out a lot about them. Some of this information may be available in reports and publications, but much of it will need to come from listening and discussing with smallstock keepers. The information needed might include: Why do they keep animals? How much contribution do the animals make to the household income? How important are they in the family’s nutrition and food security? How do they look after their animals? What do they see as their main constraints in managing their smallstock? What changes would they like to make if they had the opportunity? Who looks after the animals?

Tools for Finding Out About Smallstock Keepers KAP Studies Problem Trees and Scored Causal Diagrams Information Maps Timelines Other Participatory Methods Tools for Communicating See also the section on Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA)

We can use different kinds of methods to collect this information and develop an understanding of the context. The main kinds are:

• quantitative, which usually involve a survey; for example, a survey to count the number of smallstock of different species in a village; or a survey which interviews people about how they manage their animals
  
• qualitative, which are more open-ended in terms of the information that is recorded.

Finding out is much more effective if it is done with the full participation of the smallstock keepers concerned. The insights that are generated are more likely to reflect what smallstock keepers, rather than an outside observer, think and know; and the enquiry process becomes the first stage in a longer term process of communication and support.

	A review of a range of methods for participatory enquiry and planning with poor livestock keepers can be found in a report from a research project (R8109) on "Using livestock to improve livelihoods of landless and refugee-affected livestock keepers in Bangladesh and Nepal".
		view the report

There are many different techniques and tools that could be used. Here, we describe four methods that are commonly used and have proved useful.

KAP stands for “Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices”. A KAP study sets out to discover what a particular set of people know and understand about a topic (e.g. housing and feeding goats), what their attitudes are (e.g. do they see goats as a valuable contributor to the household livelihood or as a nuisance because the children are at school and have no time to look after them?) and what they currently do to manage them (e.g. what do they feed to their goats? do the goats have constant access to drinking water?).

There are two situations when it might be appropriate to carry out a KAP study:

• When we want to identify specific things which a project or an individual professional can do to enable people to improve on what they are doing – by giving them access to new knowledge, by providing experiences and arguments which might lead to a change in attitude, or by arranging a visit to see different practices for managing smallstock.
  
• For monitoring and evaluation (M&E) i.e. when we need to establish baseline data against which we can measure any changes during the life of a project, or after an initiative has been working for some time.

As an example, a survey of backyard poultry management practices provided useful ideas on how to improve control of Newcastle disease.

view this report

The two most common methods for collecting information on KAP are:

	Surveys, using a questionnaire to interview individual smallstock keepers	A good source of advice on designing surveys is Guidelines for Planning Effective Surveys from The University of Reading’s Statistical Services Centre (SSC)	view the document
	Focus groups, where 10 to 15 people discuss an issue and notes are made on the discussion.	For more information see the publications from Iowa State Extension Service on focus groups.	view the document

	These methods can be used together. For example, from a series of focus groups we can find out what kinds of statements smallstock keepers make about goats, which give us an insight into their attitudes. We can then put these statements into a questionnaire for a survey, to find out how common these attitudes are among different categories of smallstock keepers.
		Focus groups can be an ideal way to gather information upon which to base plans, or to modify existing programmes.

A problem tree is a visual representation of an analysis of the causes and effects of a specific problem. It can be drawn up by an individual, but when we want to use it as a tool for finding out how smallstock keepers see their problems and possible solutions, it is essential to construct it through a participatory process.

	The problem being analysed is the "trunk" of the tree; the causes are its roots and the effects are the branches.
	For more information on Problem Trees
	A Scored Causal Diagram takes the analysis a step further by asking participants to give a numerical score for each of the causes identified in the problem tree. This can be useful in identifying those causes which should be tackled first.
	For more information, see details and examples in the project report: Participatory Farm Management methods for agricultural research and extension: a training manual. view the manual

An information map shows the various sources and channels of communication that people use. With a group of smallstock keepers, you can create a map which shows where they get information from and who they go to for advice. You can show how important each source is to them by adjusting the size of the symbols on the map, and how easy or difficult it is to access them by the distance between each source and the farmers.

	For more on Information Maps
	For an example of the use of Information Maps see an information needs assessment done in the early stages of an LPP project which used information mapping (see the figure below, which is figure 1 on page 10 in the report).	go to this project
		view the report

A Timeline is one way of recording the history of agricultural innovation and change in an area. A horizontal line is used to represent a period of time. Key events during that period are then marked on the line with a symbol and date. Further information about each event is recorded in a box or table. This will give a detailed description of the sources of new ideas and technologies in the area.

	For more information on Timelines
	For an example, see a timeline drawn up by a group of smallstock keepers in Kenya, as part of a research project, Improving information and communication for smallholder farmers.	view the report
	A brief report on timeline analysis from the same research project	view the report

In addition to the above, there are a number of other Participatory Methods for data gathering or collection and these are considered in more detail in the section on Participatory Rural Appraisal or PRA. Some of the best known techniques, and those most relevant to livestock, include:

Semi-structured interviews	The use of flexible checklists rather than questionnaires.
Transect walks	These tools are used to gain information on different natural resource zones and forms of land use around a community.
Participatory mapping	An informal method for collating and plotting information on the occurrence, distribution, access and use of resources within the economic and cultural domain of a specific community.
Seasonal calendars	Techniques for defining seasons and the variety of weather patterns throughout the year that guide people's livelihoods.
Wealth ranking	Ranking of households into different classes defined by locally accepted indices of wealth or well being, or their opposites, i.e. poverty.
Proportional piling	A simple, visual method useful for determining relative values, according to the respondents' perspective.
Matrix scoring or ranking	Listing and ranking of, for example livestock species, by the attributes or outputs for which they are most valued.