Gate - the The development Research and Projects Centre (dRPC)

Key informant interviewing
Interviewing of persons in NGOs, government agencies and other organizations is the second
keystone of the community assessment strategy. Our training emphasized techniques of open-ended
interviewing, to get concrete descriptive materials about the activities of each organization, their
collaboration with other NGOs and government agencies, problems encountered by HIV/AIDS
programs, and other information. In order to be sure that certain main points were covered in each
interview, the team developed checklists of key information, which were consulted during the
interviews, although they did not use the checklists directly as "interview protocols." Very often the
interviews uncovered new, unexpected information about the organizations, their attitudes about the
HIV/AIDS issues, and their contacts with the populations and places with concentrations of high
risk behaviors.
Careful documentation through note-taking was particularly stressed. The team participants were
urged to expand their notes as soon as possible after each contact in the field. They quickly found
that writing out extensive notes on the computers is a very time-consuming process. At the same
time, the extensive note-taking provides our main source of necessary descriptive data for
understanding the activities and structures of organizations involved in the HIV/AIDS campaign.
Free listing and rating techniques
One of our first activities in the community assessment process was to collect lists from our team of
all the organizations they could think of that are involved in HIV/AIDS programs in this part of
Nigeria. Collection of such lists produces a quick preliminary inventory of the relevant
organizations, and also results in a rough measure of "salience," in the form of the frequency of
mention of individual organizations. Thus, those NGOs and governmental units that are mentioned
by a large percentage of the informants can be regarded as more salient, or "better known," in the
HIV campaign. Such lists should be collected in each of the selected states (and sub-areas of states),
from local key informants.
Near the end of our assessment activities we collected ratings from the team members, in which
they were asked to indicate which organizations they believed to be the "most effective" in the
HIV/AIDS campaign. Ideally such ratings would be collected from key informants out in the
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