The IONA Process
As a deliverable to the donor funding the intervention, IONA produces ten or perhaps a dozen potential interventions organized around the IONA framework. Many more potential interventions (and frameworks) are discarded as insufficiently important in reducing conflict or insufficiently possible in the current environment. Even more transformations are captured in the framework during field interviews as the basis for a fuller understanding of the conflict issues.
The IONA process is intended to manage the collection and synthesis of information describing the media, the conflict, and the relationship between the two. Because conflicts are complex and resources to understand them are limited, the process continually demands that the assessment team target only those issues, problems, objectives, and solutions (depending on the stage) that could reasonably produce a purposeful and possible intervention.
The IONA process comprises the following three stages:
1. Defining the Assessment
2. Interviewing Respondents
3. Designing Media Interventions
These stages are elaborated below.
Stage 1: Defining the Assessment
In the first stage of IONA, and before entering the field, the assessment team works closely with the project manager for the funding organization to do the following
1. Define the scope of work for the assessment;
2. Develop a comprehensive profile of the media landscape and capabilities;
3. Identify issues; and
4. Create an interviewing strategy to understand issues in greater detail.
These steps are explained below.
Define the Scope of Work
The scope of work (SOW) defines which issues will be included in the assessment and which will not. It is developed in collaboration with the assessment sponsor and is based on sponsor goals. The IONA methodology is intended to yield interventions that address needs articulated by the broadest range of stakeholders associated with the target issues at hand. Nevertheless, sponsors may want to focus the scope of an IONA assessment based on several considerations, such as the following:
IONA was designed to work within various parameters. Depending on sponsor needs, for example, the methodology can by applied to an entire society in conflict, or it can focus on specific issues in specific locales, such as how to use media to ameliorate tension caused by the arrival of internally displaced people in an urban area. The sponsoring organization may already have a plan that outlines its assessment of the issues facing the target society, and how the donor would like to go about addressing these issues.
Regardless, the assessment team must understand the SOW and the ramifications of any limits set on the issues, problems, and objectives defining potential interventions. In general, as the SOW narrows, more specific problems, objectives, and solutions can be generated in the assessment. For example, at the regional level, the assessment team could obtain nuanced views about girls' education from specific community leaders or particular media owners. With more granular information, the resulting media intervention becomes more specific in terms of potential partners, messages, and target audiences.
The SOW should allow a reasonable amount of time and devote sufficient personnel to the task. These issues are discussed in the Requirements section below.
Profile the Media Landscape
Next, the team will review the literature and interview subject matter experts in order to develop a profile of the target society's media. The object is to identify, to the extent possible, existing strengths and weaknesses of the media sector in the target country. Such a profile includes which media exist, who uses them, whom particular media serve, media content, media ownership, financing, level of professionalization, and media regulation. Potential resources in creating this profile include online reports by other organizations, papers published in academic journals, experts from the media industry or academia, government white papers, and trade association publications.
Some data may not be accessible to the research team while it is not in the field. This could include common media consumption habits of the target population, specific programs aired, and the programming media consumers would like to have but which is not presently available. Furthermore, various contradictions may emerge during desk research that will have to be clarified in the field. In the early stage of the fieldwork (Stage 2), the assessment team will collect this information and validate what it already knows. Appendix A provides a framework for collecting this data.
When completed, the profile should give the assessment team a general sense of the capabilities of the target society's media with respect to the conflict; that is, where media could be used as a constructive element in social transformation, and where media contribute to social fragility and conflict. If time and resources permit, the assessment team may elect to outsource the development of this profile to an in-country organization specializing in media.
Where the media can be used as a tool for social change, it is sufficient for the team to leave its assessment of the media at the level of description. If the team determines that some portion of the media are creating conflict or blocking positive social change, the team needs to flag this in order to develop an issue tree as preparation to possibly populating an IONA frame targeting transformation of some aspect of the media (see below for information on creating issue trees).
The media profile is a deliverable to the sponsor organization. It is an interim deliverable; that is, it is information that must be reported to the sponsor's project manager to show that the study is on course. It is not, however, the answer to the study. The media profile should summarize and communicate what has been learned but need not be of publication quality. It is a working document.
Identify Issues
The goal of this step is to list issues inside and outside the media sector that create fragility in the portion of the society defined by the SOW. The team makes best guesses about the issues, sub-issues, problems, and needs causing fragility in the target society. This step will result in preliminary issue trees (see figure 3). An issue tree comprises (1) issues, (2) sub-issues, (3) problems, and (4) objectives.
Developing issue trees during Stage 1 organizes initial research about issues and sub-issues that can be preliminarily linked to problems and objectives in IONA frames.
Issues. Implicit in the SOW document will be a set of issues relevant to the interests of the sponsor. Using online reports, academic papers, interaction with experts on the conflict, and government white papers, the assessment team identifies related issues and relevant sub-issues. The assessment team will estimate which issues and sub-issues are of high importance.
Figure 3. IONA Issue Tree
As a general rule, at this stage of the assessment the list of issues and sub-issues will be the most developed and longest, and the corresponding list of objectives will be the least defined and shortest.
The process of focusing the assessment team's research efforts is crucial to successfully designing effective interventions. Focusing too soon risks missing something important; focusing too late risks investing too much effort on dead-end issues and sub-issues. Even after pruning according to sponsor interests, the list of issues facing a fragile society can be long. The assessment team should identify which issues or related sub-issues are of high importance-that is, which issues the team believes warrant additional investigation-and why. Although the prioritization of issues will be subjective, the following criteria can be applied to assess their relative importance:
At the conclusion of this work, generally about one quarter (or at least ten) of the issues or sub-issues identified should be marked as high importance. The assessment team will have begun converting what it has learned from the literature and from discussions with subject matter experts into the IONA frame of problems and objectives based on KAB, obstacles, and facilitators. The goal is not to find the answer to the assessment before entering the field but rather to organize the knowledge obtained so far and to develop hypotheses about the problems and objectives corresponding to the issues the assessment is targeting. Neither the sponsor nor the assessment team should get too attached to any specific issue, problem, or objective at this stage as the fieldwork may refute the validity of the team's preliminary conclusions.
Create an Interview Strategy
Because interviews are the primary means by which an assessment team develops and validates media assessments, careful preparation during Stage 1 is vital to a successful assessment. This preparation has three interrelated elements: (1) the interview strategy, (2) the interview guides, and (3) the interview roster.
Interview Strategy
The interview strategy is a written description of how the team will collect the information necessary to complete the assessment. It defines what groups will need to be interviewed within the target society and explains why their input is important. Having defined the important groups to interview, sufficient interviews must be planned and undertaken in each interview group.
There are three types of interviews undertaken during the interviewing process: (1) interviews with media experts to validate the media profile; (2) interviews with individuals having sufficient perspective on the problems facing the target society to validate the relative importance of the identified issues and sub-issues; and (3) interviews with representatives of different groups in society to develop a deeper understanding of specific high- importance issues and their associated problems, needs, obstacles and facilitators of change, and potential solutions.
The interview strategy should also provide a rough idea of how many interviews will be performed and how many of that total will be assigned to each interview type (along with a rationale explaining the allocation). What constitutes a sufficient number will vary, but five interviews per group is reasonable. This provides a sufficient sample to understand and check the position of the majority of the group and to identify the presence of any large minority positions. Interviewers can reasonably conduct about two interviews per day, including preparation and post- interview work.
The interview strategy should also outline what special resources will be required to conduct these interviews. Will the interview team require special transportation? Are introductions necessary (and, if so, from whom)? Will translators be required? Is an exchange of gifts an important preliminary to meaningful discussion (and, if so, what sort of gifts)? If the society is in conflict, are security precautions necessary (and, if so, how will this affect the interviews)? Perhaps most importantly, who is best suited to conduct the interviews to ensure their authenticity? Populations living in conflict environments are notoriously difficult to poll or to interview with confidence.
Interview Guides
Because each interview type has a different goal, it requires a different type of interview guide. Appendix B contains a generic interview guide to identify and validate high-importance issues, and appendix C contains a generic interview guide that contains questions that map to the IONA frame.
The questions in these interview guides are intended to help the assessment team decide what types of questions to ask various respondents. They should not to be used literally in the field. Before bringing actual interview questions into the field, the team should consult with a social scientist who is from the target society or who is an expert in that society to ensure that the interview questions will make sense to potential respondents. The expert may be able to offer advice on word selection as well as on the general interviewing approach.
As part of developing an effective interview strategy, the assessment team must understand how to approach sensitive issues. The role of Islam in girls' education is an obvious example of how an interviewer could quickly alienate a respondent. For example, an interviewer in Afghanistan may suspect that radical clerics have a major role in blocking girls' access to education. The interviewer, however, cannot simply ask, "Why does Islam not permit girls to go to school?" Rather, the topic must be approached indirectly: "What does Islam say about education?" "What kind of education does Islam say girls should receive?" "How does girls' schooling differ between the Taliban period and the present?" Islam is not identified as the problem, but as a factor in education that needs to be understood. Collaborating with an expert on the target society will facilitate converting the generic interview guides provided in appendices B and C into effective guides grounded in the social, cultural, and political expectations of the target society.
When using the interview guides, the team must decide how much of the analytic framework to reveal. In interviews with social scientists or with individuals who understand some or all of the team's approach, a description of IONA methodology and the associated four-step change process can help accelerate data collection. In interviews with individuals having less or no familiarity with social science methods, the interviewer must decide how to use the IONA frame as a guide. It is important to underline here that IONA is very much grounded in the "design backward, implement forward" approach. Hence, the questions in the guidelines are also structured in a way that works backward from eliciting the future state desired by respondents, to asking how respondents think it possible to arrive at that future state, and asking for examples of previous attempts to create change (successful or not). This approach to interviewing may not always succeed because the ways people think about themselves in time and place vary extensively. It may be necessary to structure the questions entirely sequentially, starting with understanding the present and working forward incrementally until there is a thorough comprehension of the desired future state. In developing the IONA interview guides, it is crucial to make the questions meaningful to the respondents.
Interview Roster
The list of potential respondents should include individuals who can address the issues identified in the SOW. Media experts and conflict experts may be especially important respondents early in fieldwork to confirm the media profile and the preliminary issue hypotheses. Proposed interviews should be classified into one of the three different interview types described above. As a rule, at least 75 percent of the interviews should be allotted to the third type that develop a deeper understanding of specific high-importance issues and their associated problems, needs, obstacles and facilitators of change, and potential solutions.
Stage 2: Interviewing Respondents
Fieldwork is the crux of applying IONA. The five steps in this stage are as follows:
1. Validate media profile
2. Validate and rank the issues
3. Contextualize issues of high importance
4. Convert reported needs into intervention objectives
5. Enroll in-county experts as advisors
These steps are explained below.
Validate Media Profile
The assessment team arrives in the field with a detailed but preliminary profile of the media landscape generated through desk research. These findings are refined through meetings with key respondents who have knowledge of the media sector in the target society. Potential respondents could include those working in the media itself (particularly owners, editors, operators), donor and nongovernmental organizations with histories of working with the media in the target society (such as press officers as well as staff responsible for media-related program work), and media consumers who can articulate a user perspective on media patterns. Any changes to the desk-based media profile that emerges from these interviews should be incorporated into the media profile document as soon as is practically possible.
Because media is both a tool to transform society and also an institution that may need to be targeted for transformation, the assessment team attending these interviews should be prepared to perform both types of interviews. All interviews with media experts should begin as an opportunity to test the validity of the media profile developed in Stage 1. However, the discussion may move toward issues faced by the media industry, in which case the interview team should be prepared to perform an interview designed to identify the sub-issues and associated problems, needs, obstacles, facilitators, and potential solutions.
At the completion of each interview, the interviewer updates a spreadsheet designed to track interviews and compares it to the goals established in the interview strategy. Each interview should record the respondent's name, title, affiliation, contact information, interview date, interview type (media validation, issue validation, issue contextualization), interview group, and the file name for interview notes.
Validate and Rank Issues
The assessment team enters the field with a comprehensive list of the issues facing the target society and a general idea about which issues would rank in the top quartile (or, at minimum, the top 10 issues) in terms of importance. In order to focus the assessment quickly, within the first week of fieldwork the assessment team must validate and rank the list of high-importance issues by interviewing individuals with sufficient breadth of experience in the issues identified. Potential respondents include senior government ministers, university professors, and senior nonprofit executives, to name just a few examples.
Because such individuals may have in-depth information regarding a particular high-importance issue, the assessment team should attend these interviews prepared to build out an issue tree and perform an interview designed to identify the sub-issues and associated problems, needs, obstacles, facilitators, and potential solutions. Each IONA frame developed with respect to an issue or sub-issue inherits the estimated importance of the issue or sub-issue. Because IONA currently uses a spreadsheet to manage frame data (and in the future will use custom software to do the same), a numeric rating of the importance of an issue or sub-issue is used to identify and order important issues and sub-issues, and, eventually, the interventions. Following each interview, the assessment team will rate the importance of the issue to the target society as well as the credibility of the respondent on that issue. Both scores are estimates by the assessment team using the scorecards shown in table 3. Because the credibility scoring depends on how representative the respondent's insights are of his or her group, as the interview team develops a better sense of each group's views, the team may have to revisit earlier interviews and rescore them for credibility.
Again, the assessment team should update the interview spreadsheet with the relevant information.
Contextualize Issues of High Importance
Once the set of high-importance issues are validated and well defined, the assessment team conducts another type of interview to develop a full understanding of the problems, needs, obstacles, facilitators, and solutions corresponding to an issue or sub-issue. In short, for each interview the team will collect information that will be entered into one or more IONA frameworks depending on the number of examples of social transformation (already undertaken or desired in the future) communicated during an interview.
Respondents in this stage should have deep, issue-specific expertise. Potential respondents include international and domestic media professionals, university professors, or leaders from civil society, government (local, national, and supranational), and communities.
Table 3. Scoring for IONA Issue Importance and
1 This person represents only his or her own perceptions accurately.
2 This person sometimes accurately represents the perceptions of his or her group.
3 This person accurately represents the perceptions of his or her group.
4 This person sometimes accurately represents the perceptions of his or her society.
5 This person accurately describes his or her society without bias.
In this stage, the assessment team is trying to understand how far along the change process the society has progressed regarding a particular issues or sub-issue. In most cases, the society will have had some success in making changes to KAB that are necessary to reach its goals. At the same time, in its current state, the target society may have failed at least once to make KAB changes necessary to progress further. For example, if on a particular issue, a target society has progressed to Step 2 on the Change Ladder, the respondent will report that the society has had some success in making the changes in KAB required to question the status quo. At the same time, the respondent may report multiple failures in developing the KAB necessary to understand what alternative it faces to the status quo, which is Step 3 on the Change Ladder. Any designed media intervention must target the position on the Change Ladder where the target society has failed to advance.
For each success or failure in social transformation described by the respondent, the team is expected to understand the change in the KAB identified; the obstacles that prevented realization of that change; the facilitators that enabled the change; the level in the society where the change was expected, and the solutions activities that were attempted. Of particular interest to the assessment team will be the needs articulated for failed transformations. These needs, in conjunction with similar needs reported in other interviews, will become the basis for an intervention developed to address the associated issue or sub-issue.
For each social transformation attempted, the respondent will describe the activities undertaken by society. The assessment team must categorize the activities as either issue activities or obstacle activities. Each type of intervention activity has a target. In the case of issue activities, the targets are the KAB that create conflict; in the case of obstacle activities, the targets are the KAB that block the desired social transformation. Any attempted transformation, whether a success or failure, must be formally captured in the IONA frame, tagged by issue, by interview, and by interviewers.
Because IONA evaluates potential media interventions in terms both of importance and effectiveness, each frame is tagged with information concerning the transformation's importance. Each solutions activity described in the frame is assigned an estimated effectiveness score. How well did it dispose of its target? If the activity's target was to show parents how other parents risk educating their daughters, how effective was a Public Service Announcement (PSA) campaign in changing the parents' attitudes on the risks they face in sending their daughters to school? The assessment team estimates both the effectiveness of the activity and the credibility of the respondent. Both scores are estimates by the assessment team using the scorecards shown in table 4.
Finally, after each interview (preferably, no later than the evening of the interview), the interviewers must transfer the insights from the interview into their IONA database and update the interview spreadsheet.
Convert Reported Needs into Intervention Objectives
IONA creates media interventions based on the needs reported by respondents with respect to particular issues. Because those needs may be contradictory-the society, after all, is in conflict-the assessment team must convert the needs reported during interviewing into objectives for potential media interventions.
Table 4. Scoring for IONA Solutions Activity Effectiveness and Respondent Credibility
To do this, the assessment team collects all failed frames relevant to a particular issue or sub-issue. The needs described in these frames may be very similar or they may be very different. Where there is agreement on what needs to be done, the objective is easily defined by the assessment team. More often, however, because different groups in society have different and conflicting interests, the assessment team must identify an intervention objective that can resolve the conflict implicit in those identified needs. In defining a desired social transformation for an issue, the assessment team should review information concerning obstacles and facilitators.
In reframing reported needs as intervention objectives, the assessment team will also have some insight into how to realize the objective.
Although a formal analysis that links solutions activities to social transformation is a Stage 3 activity, the assessment team is expected to have preliminary hypotheses ready at the end of Stage 2 as to what solutions activities (issue and obstacle) will realize the desired social transformations.
Enroll In-Country Experts as Advisers
As the interview process proceeds, some respondents will stand out in particular for the depth of their insight, their ability to adequately represent members of an interview group, or their knowledge of or connectedness to media in the target society. The assessment team should enroll these individuals as experts to consult in Stage 3. Because the assessment team will no longer be in the field when these experts are needed, these individuals must have the capacity to respond relatively quickly (by phone or e-mail) to queries from the assessment team. In some cases, a stipend may be required to guarantee action.
The experts on this list have the following two tasks with respect to the interventions developed in Stage 3:
No individual will possess expertise across the entire s