What we do

With the bottom-up approach of EPI, instead of ‘experts’ or ‘scholars’ defining what peace means and what it looks like, communities define for themselves the everyday indicators that they use to measure successful peace in their own communities. And since these definitions may vary between communities, the indicators that people use might also change. The Everyday Indicators process understands that peace can’t be measured in the same way in every part of a country.

The Everyday Indicators Approach has key advantages:

Accuracy

--

everyday indicators are accurate because they come from people’s real experiences in their daily lives.

Scope

everyday indicators can tell us about the wider dynamics of a society in transition because community members can choose what is meaningful to them.

Ownership

everyday indicators come from project beneficiaries themselves.

Empowerment

everyday indicators give communities a say in how they are presented.

Scale

everyday indicators can help us see the differences, often subtle, within and between communities.

Using participatory research methods, EPI utilizes focus groups to identify indicators that communities use to assess changes in peace and conflict in their locality. These indicators can then be used to design, monitor and evaluate external interventions. The choice of indicators helps reveal community priorities and how communities see their own experiences.

In addition, the Everyday Peace Indicators approach strives to influence wider debates about the measurement of difficult-to-measure concepts and aims to develop a system that is complementary to standard top-down indexes and barometers by influencing the debates on concept formation and quantitative measurement.

Back to Home > About > What we do