Barnaby Peacocke responds to Jayantha: using SoC/MSC to build baselines and the problems of analysing SoC with a historical perspective

I'm discussing this with Jayantha, but thought I'd share you some initial thoughts straight away.

Essentially the question Jayantha is raising is about the validity of collecting stories at the onset of a project

Myself I think this is a good approach - equivalent to a kind of narrative baseline. Instead of asking "over the last month, what have been the most significant changes..." the question is something like, "as things stand now, what are the most significant issues you are facing in relation to...[dimension of change]".

[Example:]
So for instance, for coir producers, "what are the most significant influences affecting your abilties to produce and market coir". From a range of stories shared by coir producers they could then select the one or two they feel best reresent the situation as it is today. It then becomes interesting to compare their selected stories over the next couple of years against their current perceptions

This in effect supports Jayantha's first bullet point - asking whether it is ok to collect stories where we expect future changes to happen as a resul of certain activities

Concerning documenting stories that look back to what was happening some time ago - I have done this kind of thing in field assessments asking people about how they perceive changes in things like production and rainfall patterns compared with 10 years ago or so; this timeline approach in participatory rural appraisal is quite common. But this is risky. We have to be careful not to overinterpret the data/stories we get. There are many biases that will confuse people's perceptions of change when looking back historically.

[Example:]
People who are facing current difficulties as a result, say, of economic downturns may share stories of the past that are in fact too rosey. "Oh the rains were much better then" - looking back to the good old days which actually never existed - so when you look at historical rainfall patterns there's actually been no change, it's the prices that slumped. Or vice versa.

So while the approach may be useful to see what people were doing in the past I'd suggest if anyone does do this they use the same principles of triangulation as recommended in PRA; for instance by getting historical stories from other stakeholders (market middle men, ministry and other actors) with which to compare (and triangulate) historical stories from producers.

Overall therefore you can see I am much less keen on this approach. I feel much more comfortable if we are asking for stories about the current situation and/or recent changes. Otherwise we do risk opening up a bit of a methodological minefield for ourselves

Best wishes
Barney