Methodology

The Voices of Peace Portal brings together indicators collected through research projects conducted by the Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI) research team and through closely related participatory approaches, including projects using the Grounded Accountability Model (GAM). These projects were carried out with academic institutions, civil society organizations, and community partners across multiple countries and regions.

Most existing peace and conflict data either documents violent events through secondary sources or asks people to respond to questions designed by researchers. The indicators in this portal work differently. They are generated by communities themselves through participatory processes where people identify the signs they observe in everyday life that tell them whether conditions around them are getting better or worse. The result is locally grounded evidence that complements more conventional forms of peace and conflict data.

The portal is not a comprehensive archive of all EPI-related research. It is a curated collection of indicators that can be responsibly shared for research, education, and policy purposes, and it will continue to grow as new projects are documented and as communities grant permission for their data to be shared publicly.

Since 2013, EPI research has been carried out in conflict-affected and post-conflict settings, including Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, Sri Lanka, South Africa, South Sudan, Uganda, the USA, and Zimbabwe. Across these projects, researchers and community partners have generated more than 18,000 community-defined indicators.

Although each project is adapted to its context, the methodology follows seven core steps designed to ensure both community participation and analytical rigor:

1. 01

   Choosing the concept

   The process begins with the identification of a concept to be explored, such as peace, justice, reconciliation, or security. This stage involves discussion with local partners and community stakeholders to ensure that the concept is socially meaningful and linguistically appropriate. In some contexts, commonly used terms may carry political or historical sensitivities, requiring researchers and community partners to agree on alternative formulations that resonate with participants’ everyday experiences.
2. 02

   Identifying participating communities

   Researchers then work with local partners to identify the communities or social groups who will participate in the research. A community might be a village, a neighborhood, or a group of people connected by shared experience or social ties. Within each community, participants are selected to reflect a range of perspectives, including different genders, age groups, and economic backgrounds, so that the discussions capture experiences from across the community’s power dynamics. In some settings, groups are also separated along lines that reflect the dynamics of the conflict itself. Where communities divided by ethnicity or other fault lines would not speak openly in mixed discussions, separate groups are formed so that participants can share indicators that are meaningful to their experience. How groups are composed is always shaped by the local context. The aim is to include diverse voices, rather than to create a statistically representative sample.
3. 03

   Generating indicators

   Indicators are generated through facilitated discussions with community members (focus group discussions). Participants are invited to reflect on the signs they observe in daily life that signal whether things are getting better or worse in relation to the concept being explored. Through guided conversations, these reflections are translated into concrete and observable indicators, such as everyday practices, social interactions, or changes in the local environment. Because these indicators originate from community discussions, they frequently reflect local language and context-specific experiences that are not easily captured by externally designed surveys.
4. 04

   Verifying and voting

   Following the generation of a preliminary list, researchers return to the community to verify and refine the indicators. Participants review them, clarify what they mean, and remove anything that is duplicated or unclear. In many projects, a larger community meeting is then held where participants collectively vote on which indicators best represent their experience. This step produces a final set of indicators that the community has validated. The vote totals recorded for each indicator give a sense of which observations a community considered most salient. An indicator that received widespread support points to something broadly recognized, while one with fewer votes may reflect the experience of a smaller group within the community. However, the voting process is participatory, not experimental. The numbers indicate relative importance but should not be treated as precise measurements. A vote count of fifty does not mean an indicator is twice as significant as one that received twenty-five.
5. 05

   Coding and analysis

   Once indicators have been verified, researchers analyze them using qualitative coding techniques. Coding frameworks are developed inductively with local research teams to group indicators into broader themes such as social relations, security, livelihoods, governance, or infrastructure. While indicators remain specific to their communities, coding allows researchers to identify patterns across contexts and enables comparative analysis. See example codebooks here.
6. 06

   Using the indicators

   What happens with the verified indicators depends on the project. In some, they are built into surveys that track how frequently people observe them and whether conditions are shifting over time. Some projects fold a selection of community-generated indicators into existing baseline, midline, and endline assessments, so that external measures and community measures sit side by side; others use them as a standalone instrument, which EPI supports directly. Many projects never build a survey. Indicators are used instead to inform program design, where what communities named as signs of improvement shapes objectives and theories of change, or to structure monitoring and evaluation work that stays qualitative, or as research evidence in their own right.
7. 07

   Returning findings to communities

   The final step is bringing the results back to the people who contributed them. EPI projects treat communities as partners in the research, not simply as sources of data. Findings may be shared through workshops, visual exhibitions, group discussions, or other formats. This step reinforces transparency, trust, and accountability in the research relationship.

GAM originated through early collaborations and piloting involving Search for Common Ground, Asociación MINGA, COSURCA, and EPI researchers. Rather than being developed by or belonging to a single organization, it emerged through efforts to adapt the core principle of community-generated indicators to different program and evaluation settings. Whereas the EPI methodology was designed as a structured research approach, GAM allows greater flexibility in how participatory indicator generation is incorporated into program design, monitoring, evaluation, and learning.

Search for Common Ground incorporated community-generated indicators into all of its monitoring, evaluation, accountability, and learning work. Asociación MINGA applied GAM at the national level in Colombia, working on territorial permanence and peace, and used the resulting indicators to set its own working priorities and evaluate its activities, continuing to do so after the funded phase of the project ended. COSURCA worked at a local level in Cauca on concepts connected to its agro-ecological programming, and drew on the indicators it collected to evaluate a project on making household kitchens more sustainable. The portal contains only a small fraction of the indicators generated through these processes, limited to those that could be responsibly shared publicly.

Part of what makes GAM distinctive is the range of adaptations it accommodates. The EPI methodology’s indicator-generation process can involve focus groups and verification rounds lasting a full day or more, whereas some program settings allow only a few hours. EPI projects have also frequently focused on subjective and difficult-to-define concepts such as peace or justice, while GAM has been used to generate indicators around more concrete program questions. Such adaptations reflect GAM’s broader aim of making community-generated indicators practical and usable across different operational contexts and needs.

A community of practice established in 2021 brings together practitioners and researchers interested in participatory approaches to monitoring and evaluation to exchange experiences and further develop these approaches. Join the community.

To support analysis and comparison, researchers have organized the indicators into thematic dimensions, categories, and subcategories using coding frameworks developed alongside local research teams. The coding manuals and codebooks used in this process by EPI teams are available on the EPI dataset page.

The portal also uses AI-based tools (large language models) to support exploration of the dataset. These tools generate thematic groupings, identify connections between indicators, and allow you to search across the collection by meaning rather than just by keyword. These outputs are designed to help you explore the data. They complement the original coding but should not be treated as definitive classifications.

For more on how the data should be read in context and the ethical principles guiding this research, see the About page.

Translations were produced either by professional translators or with the help of a large language model. All machine-generated translations were reviewed by humans. Under ideal circumstances, the translation process would have involved organized feedback loops between research personnel and community members to ensure careful validation and minimize potential bias. However, this was not always feasible. Considering the context-dependent and sensitive nature of translation, the portal has sought to display indicators in their original language whenever possible. Users who wish to propose revisions to existing translations may contact the portal team at info@everydaypeaceindicators.org.

Firchow, P., & Mac Ginty, R. (2020). Including hard-to-access populations using mobile phone surveys and participatory indicators. Sociological Methods & Research, 49(1), 133–160.

Fairey, T., Firchow, P., & Dixon, P. (2024). Images and indicators: Mixing participatory methods to build inclusive rigour. Action Research, 22(2), 135–154.

Urwin, E., Botoeva, A., Arias, R., Vargas, O., & Firchow, P. (2023). Flipping the power dynamics in measurement and evaluation: International aid and the potential for a grounded accountability model. Negotiation Journal, 39(4), 401–426.

Firchow, P. (2018). Reclaiming everyday peace: Local voices in measurement and evaluation after war. Cambridge University Press.

Concept: The broad, often abstract idea explored during an indicator-generation process, such as peace, justice, security, reconciliation, or social cohesion. Communities are asked to identify the signs they observe in everyday life that tell them whether the concept is present or absent, improving or deteriorating. The indicators they generate reflect how they recognize and experience that concept in practice.

Community: The primary group involved in the research. A community is a group of people who share a connection to a place or to each other. This might be a village, a neighborhood, a cluster of settlements linked by social, cultural, or geographic ties, or a group defined by shared ethnic identity. For example, in Kyrgyzstan, the concept of religious freedom was explored and the “communities” were groups of various religious minorities rather than geographic communities.

Coding Framework: A system for organizing indicators into themes so they can be compared and analyzed. In many EPI projects, indicators are grouped at three levels of increasing specificity: dimensions, categories, and subcategories. The themes emerge from the indicators themselves rather than being decided in advance. The Voices of Peace Portal primarily displays the category level.

Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI): A participatory research methodology for working with communities to identify locally meaningful indicators of concepts such as peace, justice, security, coexistence, reconciliation, and wellbeing. The resulting indicators can be used for research, monitoring, evaluation, and policy analysis. EPI is also the name of the non-profit organization that develops and applies the methodology, made up of multiple research teams and individual researchers.

Grounded Accountability Model (GAM): A participatory approach to program design, monitoring, and evaluation that places community perspectives at the center of decision-making. GAM engages community members in defining indicators that reflect their own understandings of key concepts, ensuring that interventions and assessments are grounded in local priorities and experiences.

Indicator: A situation, action, behavior, process, or condition that community members identify as a sign of a particular concept such as peace. Indicators are generated through group discussions and expressed in the language of the participants.

Photovoice: A participatory visual research method that combines photography and storytelling. Community members take photographs of aspects of their daily lives and provide accompanying descriptions, creating visual records of the issues they consider important. Photovoice can be used alongside indicator generation to deepen understanding of community experiences.

Valence: Refers to whether an indicator signals the presence of a concept (positive valence) or the absence of a concept (negative valence). For example, “neighbors are visiting each other again” would carry positive valence, while “people avoid walking alone at night” would carry negative valence. In the portal, valence is recorded for the indicators from Oakland, United States.