Quality of Your Engagement Process
Evaluating the quality and experience of engagement is a critical part of assessing its overall value. As a court convening public engagement activities, you want to take steps to ensure that your engagement activities – regardless of form or process – are high quality experiences that participants find to be satisfying, constructive, and fair. High quality, personally satisfying engagement activities should facilitate good engagement outcomes, and increase the value of public engagement among both communities and court actors.
The project pilot teams wished to expand engagement activities and community-court networks to increase public input about important matters. The qualitative characteristics of an engagement are key to building support and capacity for further growth. This evaluation used largely post-survey items to measure how participants perceived the breadth or depth of topics of discussion, relevance of discussion topics, and overall discussion dynamics and participant satisfaction.
Post-Survey Items
Because the aim was to understand how people experienced the engagement, these questions were only administered after the engagement.
Note: To see how the questions are formatted and phrased in context, view the post surveys.
- How important to you were the topics addressed during the engagement activities? (followed by an ordered 5-point scale ranging from "Extremely important," "Very important," "Somewhat important," "Slightly important," "Not at all important")
- How useful was the information that was presented? (followed by an ordered 5-point scale ranging from "Extremely useful," "Very useful," "Somewhat useful," "Slightly useful," "Not at all useful")
- How fully or in-depth were questions discussed? (followed by an ordered 5-point scale ranging from "Extremely in-depth," "Very in-depth," "Somewhat in-depth," "Slightly in-depth," "Not at all in-depth")
- How much did you feel you personally were listened to and understood during the discussions? (followed by an ordered 5-point scale ranging from "A great deal," "Quite a bit," "Some," "A little," “Not at all")
- How much did the discussion help you see new viewpoints? (followed by an ordered 5-point scale ranging from "A great deal," "Quite a bit," "Some," "A little," "Not at all")
- How satisfied or unsatisfied were you with the engagement activities? (followed by an ordered 5-point scale ranging from "Very satisfied," "Satisfied," "Neither satisfied nor unsatisfied," "Dissatisfied," "Very dissatisfied")