Successful Communication?

During our time in Impfondo, INCEF’s educators carried out several screenings of the films for their project on violence prevention, and held several focus group discussions with both men and women about the films. This time in Impfondo gave me the opportunity to observe INCEF’s communication work first-hand, which is an important and necessary part of the research process. The more of these discussion groups that I see, the more I understand the important role they play in INCEF’s communication methodology.

The educators consistently told me that they felt the discussions were necessary for the audience or the community to fully appreciate or internalize the messages from the films. It was in the discussion groups that educators also received what were, to them, clear indications that successful communication had taken place – community members would ask questions, offer examples from their own experience, make jokes, and engage with one another and with the educators on the topic(s) at hand. Educators reported that the various non-verbal signals they could see – smiles, gestures, eye contact, and other expressions – were clear indications to them that the audience understood and accepted the information and messages in the films. They also reported numerous verbal exchanges with participants that further supported their belief that the communication had been successful. In particular, educators would relate powerful anecdotes of individuals who had told them how the messages in INCEF’s programs had led them to change their own behavior or intended future behavior, and thanked the educators for the programs.

The question of effect is, for all communication organizations, the key issue that must be proven to other stakeholders, including national partners and international donors. Communication projects are undertaken because, at some point, someone or some organization has determined that one part of a complex problem is linked to a lack of information, or to attitudes and behaviors that may be amenable to change through communication intervention. Thus, at some point there has been a judgment made that change needs to happen in a community, and communication has been identified as one way to achieve that change. There are, obviously, important questions to ask about who has determined that change is needed, and what sort of change, and how it is to be achieved, but ultimately the common preoccupation of all development programs, health programs, and environmental programs is to produce some sort of effect, and to be able to prove that the program was responsible for that effect.

Local partners and community members are also concerned about the effects of communication programs, as was clear when INCEF’s educator and I made our pre-departure calls on the Sub-Prefect in Impfondo. The purpose of our visit this time was to give an oral account of the activities that had been carried out by INCEF during our visit, a reverse process of les civilites we had performed when we arrived. After he listened to the account, the Sub-Prefect expressed his approval, saying that the local authorities always noticed an improvement in the town after an INCEF project. He then said, speaking in the plural for all the local authorities, “We are satisfied.” He expressed appreciation for INCEF’s work, and for the effect he perceived it to have on social relations and behavior in Impfondo and the surrounding area. Since the most recent INCEF activities had to do with violence prevention, he cited a decrease in reported acts of violence and a sense of “calmness” that was observed by local authorities.

An ethnographic approach is not the appropriate method to use for program evaluation, as it is not equipped (or intended) to prove any cause and effect relationship between phenomena. One place where ethnography of communication may help in the evaluation process, however, is in understanding what successful communication looks like in a local context, and in knowing how members of a particular speech community interpret their own and others’ communication as either effective or ineffective.

My time in Impfondo, observing projects as they were implemented, and also observing everyday interactions and communicative events has given me an introduction to some of the ways that participants in this community evaluate their own speech and the speech of others. This is a long way from a full understanding of the speech code or codes operating here, but it does provide a starting point for further investigation.