MSC for Design and Monitoring

[Britt Sloan]

Hi All, 

I'm currently supporting an INGO that is interested in adapting various participatory and qualitative methods for routine program monitoring. MSC is one of the approaches that this organization is interested in adapting, and a few questions have bubbled up that I'd like to throw out to the group: 

• In my experience, MSC is best done as quite a deliberate and time-intensive process to give sufficient space to generate buy-in, manage data quality, and ensure meaningful reflection and deliberation among participants. Where teams attempt to simplify MSC, it tends to become a story collection exercise, without the rigor of the selection process, rendering it no longer MSC. I'd be interested to hear if folks have had experience adapting MSC to be quick and dirty, so that program teams can conduct the process (selection included!) with fewer resources and on a more frequent (e.g., quarterly) basis?
• This INGO indicated that they have faced quite a bit of pressure to put equity at the center of MSC. This seems to be emerging from an inherent trust in traditional quantitative sampling methods to manage equity concerns, and mistrust in qualitative approaches. Nonetheless, I'd be glad if anyone can share some concrete research or guidance around equity and inclusion in MSC.
• While MSC is typically used as an indicator-free approach to monitoring and evaluation, I wonder if anyone has experience using MSC as an approach to developing participant-defined, qualitative indicators? In this scenario, the significance, the values articulated by participants during the story selection panels, could become qualitative indicators that could be monitored using other means throughout the project cycle. 

Thanks so much for your insights!

Britt