Determine the indicator's value by using the following methodology:
1) Define whose understanding of social and behaviour change (SBC) you want to measure. In particular, these should be those responsible for writing project proposals, designing activities that promote different practices, and ensuring their implementation, monitoring, and evaluation.
2) Define the essential SBC-related knowledge and attitudes the prioritised staff should have. There may be different expectations from different staff (e.g. those who write proposals versus those who work at the community level). If so, you might need to prepare multiple lists of the desired knowledge / skills, depending on the type of work a staff member does. The steps below will apply separately to each list / staff line of work in such a case.
3) Prepare a simple test to assess whether the project staff have the pre-defined, most important knowledge and attitudes. The test can use a combination of the following:
- questions assessing people’s knowledge related to the key principles and practices of effective SBC interventions
- scenarios where the person is asked to describe how s/he would respond to a given situation (i.e. there are no predefined answers)
- questions asking people to choose between two or more statements (one being correct, one or more being incorrect)
- questions assessing the extent to which people believe common misconceptions related to the design, implementation, and M&E of SBC interventions
Ensure that you include enough open-ended questions, as, compared to questions with single / multiple choice answers, they allow you to better understand people’s knowledge. If you do not specialise in SBC, engage a relevant expert in preparing and evaluating the test.
To avoid having unrealistically high or unnecessarily low requirements, verify the difficulty of the test by pre-testing it with several people.
4) Decide how many marks will be allocated to each correct answer. For example, for a correct answer to a simple question, you can give one mark; for correct answers to more complex questions / scenarios, you can give two marks.
5) Decide how many marks a person needs to get to be considered as “understanding the key principles and practices of effective SBC interventions” (e.g. a score of at least 30 out of 40).
6) Administer the test. If you need to compare a member of staff’s awareness before and after a specific learning event (e.g. a training), you might need to design two comparable tests, so that you can administer a pre- and post-test.
7) Count the number of staff who achieved the minimum acceptable score (see point 5).
8) To calculate the indicator’s value, divide the number of staff who achieved the minimum acceptable score by the total number of staff who completed the test. Multiply the result by 100 to convert it to a percentage.