Designing and Assessing a Community-Engaged Digital Enablement Program: A Case Study

Abstract

Over the last decade, in acknowledgment of a growing challenge of digital divide, researchers have been partnering with community organizations to explore community-engaged methods to empower under-served communities as they respond to new challenges in a digitally-dominated world. These community-engaged methods show great promise, enabling localized interventions which honor the lived reality of participants, but their highly customized nature also presents new challenges in measurement and assessment for the research community. In this work, we present a case study of a 12-session workshop series focused on digital enablement and describe challenges of applying traditional evaluation methods in understanding the value of the program. As a response to these challenges, we propose a framework for assessment of similar programs that enables us to better understand the ways in which our participants created digital capital and will support cross-study comparison and evaluation in future work.