Democratizing Research

As a research methodologist with expertise in anti-oppressive and anti-extractive methods, University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work (GSSW) Professor Colleen Fisher works to advance use of bottom-up and participatory approaches to research. Most recently, that has included a two-year, mixed-methods cluster randomized controlled trial of Singing to the Lions (STL), a three-day biopsychosocial intervention designed in Zimbabwe for Zimbabwean youth who had experienced trauma.

Fisher is a global health equity scholar who focuses on the intersection of health, gender, and poverty in low- and middle-income countries and other low-resource contexts. She says, “People have used [STL] all over the world, but there had never been a rigorous evaluation of it. This was the first research to ever assess the impact.”

The methods Fisher used also marked another first. She explains, “Typically, when people say ‘mixed methods,’ what they mean is, there’s an overarching large quantitative piece of the study, and then there’s standard qualitative interviews.” However, instead of qualitative interviews. Fisher’s team asked a subsample of participating children to draw something according to a prompt and then asked the children to tell them about what they drew. “The drawings themselves are the qualitative data, and the children’s annotations of the objects in the drawings.”

The researchers also used the Most Significant Change method, which Fisher says is used extensively in the international development and program evaluation fields but to her knowledge has not been used in social work. “It’s completely participatory, as in the researcher essentially gets out of the way and has the community itself collect and analyze the data.”

Most Significant Change facilitates storytelling to examine intervention impacts. For the STL study, the community itself determined the domains of change: child attitudes, behaviors, and skills. Community members were trained to conduct two-question 1:1 interviews (N = 50) with parents/caregivers in one rural and one urban community, asking them, “What was the most significant change you observed?” and “Why do you consider that change the most significant?” Teachers from the classrooms where STL was delivered then analyzed the data together in two groups; each group then selected five parent stories of change, sharing them back during a community celebration.

Fisher notes that methods such as Most Significant Change democratize the research process through participatory data collection and analysis. This strategy can deepen researchers’ understanding of intervention effects from diverse perspectives. At the same time, such methods can empower participants and enhance the relevance and acceptability of research findings for the community.

In Phase 1 of the STL project, 1,342 adolescents were randomized by their school to the immediate intervention group or waitlist control group. Demographic characteristics and trauma symptoms were assessed at baseline and intervention outcomes of self-esteem, self-efficacy, hope, self-calming, and social support were assessed at baseline, at the end of the intervention, and again three months later. Phase 2 included the caregiver interviews and analysis of youths’ drawings. Overall, quantitative findings showed that youth who received STL demonstrated significantly greater increases in all five target outcomes and that the differences were sustained at the three-month follow-up for all outcomes except hope. Analysis of the children’s drawings identified seven themes: (1) future hope and aspirations, (2) confidence and courage, (3) children’s vulnerability, (4) youth-tailored strategies, (5) external support systems, (6) freedom from fear, and (7) empowerment.

Fisher notes, “it felt really important to evaluate the intervention using traditional quantitative methods that the research community would recognize and funders would recognize so that the community partner would get the data that they need to sustain their efforts. And it also felt really, really important to partner that with participatory qualitative methods that were ultimately selected by the community itself.”

Fisher’s research was conducted in collaboration with NGO Miracle Missions Vimba, University of Zimbabwe education faculty, and funder Catholic Relief Services. The team is now disseminating their work, with the first of five planned manuscripts published in PLOS Mental Health in September 2026. Because dissemination to the local community is equally important to Fisher as sharing findings with the scientific community, every time the team writes a paper about STL, a graphic designer creates a comic-style one pager in English and Shona (the local language), written for low-literacy audiences. In May 2026, Fisher presented findings in Santiago, Chile, at the Global Awareness Society International conference and in June 2026, at the Social Work & Social Development conference in Nairobi, Kenya. Fisher hopes to deliver a related methods presentation on “democratizing evidence in social work” at the January 2027 Society for Social Work and Research conference.

Fisher says that at their core, methods such as Most Significant Change are “diffusing the power that typically is sourced within the researcher to the community. It’s not really power-sharing; it’s literally shifting power to the community and not just in data collection, but in analysis of the data. “[It aligns] with social work values to elicit perspectives of how the intervention impacts people’s lives, in participants’ own words, using their own frame of reference.”

She continues, “To me, that feels incredibly powerful. We’re very intentionally stepping aside and saying, I want to learn what the community says is important. And I trust that what comes out is going to be just as meaningful or important or maybe more so than what we would have gotten if we would have gone down a different road where I led it.”