My husband, a documentary filmmaker and owner of
Mission Pictures, is consistently astounded that at any party I can find a linguist or social scientist who is thrilled to geek out with me. Recently, at one such party, I met Tom, an activist involved in public transportation, who happily followed me down the rabbit hole of metrics, measurement and outcomes (oh, my!)...
But before we get into cocktail party conversation, some notes about this blog. It's meant to explore what measurement and metrics mean in the real-world. How are our lives different (or the same) when we assess our goals in different ways? ...when we aim for something less achievable, more ambitious? ...when we get curious about exactly how things are getting done, instead of how they are being statistically reported to us?
I want to use this platform to geek out about qualitative and quantitative data, about linguistics, about non-profit evaluation, and about visualization of data. Thanks for coming along!
But back to the glass of wine at hand... Tom (my social activist partner in crime) and I spent way too much of the holiday party talking about different measurement approaches to proving an outcome of safer public transportation.
One approach we discussed would be to measure the number of citations given out by transportation police. Theoretically, higher citations means higher incident intervention which means better public safety. But an unintended consequence of approaching the issue from this negative or deficit standpoint is that safety officers could go undercover, abdicating visible presence and leaving more space open for people to misbehave. There could be more incident interventions, but if this is coupled with more incidences, you're really back where you started.
Another approach we discussed would be to measure the number of safety incidences within the system. Lower incidences here means better public safety. A consequence of this measurement approach might be higher visibility of officers throughout the system, or in key locations. Ideally, the presence of visible officers could deter incidences altogether.
How critical are we being as individuals, as families, as companies, as communities about how we measure the results of our goals? As we come up on the New Year and Resolutions, I challenge you to spend more time thinking about how you will know you've achieved your goal, and whether what you're measuring will take you there through deficit or visible positivity.
