Community Data Talks Back
- Sarah Gambell
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Reflecting on three years of co-produced research, and what comes next
After three years of working alongside community groups as part of the GALLANT (Glasgow As A Living Lab Accelerating Novel Transformation) project based at the University of Glasgow, our team has reached a major milestone: the end of our core data collection period across six community science projects. We have an extraordinary amount of data.
What makes this dataset unique isn’t just its size or duration, but rather that the entire process was co-produced and community-generated. Participants helped decide what mattered, what questions to ask, and what data to generate, and are now helping to interpret the findings.
As we transition from gathering data to analysing it, we’re beginning to ask a new set of questions. Not just “what did people say?” - but also “how did their perceptions change over time, and what within the project made those changes possible?”
This blog post offers a look at how we’re approaching the analysis and what we hope to learn from it. Feedback is welcome!
Over the course of the project, we collected a rich and varied body of material that captures how people think, feel and talk about sustainability, climate, and community change.
Our dataset includes:
Transcribed participant interviews
Transcribed focus group recordings (for app design and community project development)
Transcribed focus group recordings for community data co-analysis sessions
Observational field notes
Participant feedback and monitoring & evaluation data
Participant-written blog posts
WhatsApp group chat conversations
Spatial and narrative mapping data from our apps (including deep maps and the communiMap repository)
Video recordings
Taken together, this creates a multi-modal, longitudinal dataset that spans three years of collective, co-designed, co-produced activity.
As we begin analysing this material, our guiding question is simple but ambitious: How did participants’ perceptions shift over time - and what dynamics within the project helped make those shifts happen?
We’re particularly interested in understanding:
Changes in confidence and sense of agency,
How participants frame responsibility and action,
How narratives about climate, community, and change evolve,
What becomes more or less prominent in how people talk about these issues
Crucially, we are not assuming that change is always positive or linear. The goal is not to prove that the project “worked”, but to understand how and why change happens in real contexts.
Our proposed analytical approach sits between two complementary methods: Corpus-driven analysis: letting patterns emerge from the data without imposing rigid categories in advance, and corpus-assisted analysis: using tools to explore specific research questions we already care about. We want to be able to use digital tools to identify patterns across large volumes of text and speech and explore how language reflects underlying narratives, beliefs and assumptions. In an initial emerging paper, we will look at transcribed participant interviews, focus group recordings, and community data co-analysis sessions.
Balancing these approaches is essential. We will begin analysis with certain questions - but we expect those questions to evolve as the data “talks back”.
We already know that participants often answered research questions without explicitly realising they were doing so. Some of the most interesting insights are likely to appear indirectly, in unexpected places. This means the process will be iterative. Categories may shift. New themes may emerge - and our understanding will develop alongside the analysis.
One of the most exciting parts of this work is the opportunity to explore change across time. Because the dataset spans three years, we can look at:
What topics dominated early conversations compared with later ones,
How language and framing evolved,
Which ideas became more central or more peripheral,
Where confidence or uncertainty shifted
We are particularly interested in questions of agency:
Who do participants believe can act?
Where do they locate responsibility?
How do they describe their own role in change?
We’ll also explore how people divide the world into different actors and groups - the subtle ways “us” and “them” appear in discussions about climate and sustainability. These underlying narratives and ideologies often shape how people see what is possible.
A key aim of the emerging paper, and the analysis, is to move beyond describing change to understanding what made it possible. Change is not random. People don’t shift their views in a vacuum. We want to understand how participation in the project itself shaped things like engagement, learning, confidence, and collective thinking. What were the dynamics that helped create the conditions for change?
By exploring this question, we hope to develop a richer understanding of how community-based projects can support meaningful engagement with complex issues like climate and sustainability. While digital tools and linguistic methods play an important role, this work is about more than technical analysis.It is also a methodological reflection on what we learned from co-producing research, what it means to analyse longitudinal participatory data, and how mixed-method, multi-modal datasets can be studied. We hope the research will contribute to wider conversations about how to evaluate and understand community engagement projects. We aim to provide a deep, contextualised case study that offers insight into how change unfolds in practice.
We’re now moving into the early stages of analysis, beginning by exploring individual documents and datasets to identify emerging themes and patterns. The next step is to get all of the transcribed data into NVivo and start the initial coding. It’s the start of a new phase: one where the focus shifts from gathering stories to understanding what those stories can teach us. We’re excited to see what emerges!
communiMap is an easy-to-use community science app developed by the GALLANT project at the University of Glasgow. It helps people of all ages notice, record, and share what they see in their neighbourhoods, from urban trees and hidden wildlife to water events, local energy projects, and compost heaps.
Download Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spotteron.communimap
Download iOS: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/communimap/id674672385
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