Review

Observation or participation?

COMMUNITY PROFILING: AUDITING SOCIAL NEEDS
Murray Hawtin, Geraint Hughes and Janie Percy-Smith
Open University Press, 1994, £12.99

This book announces that it is a step-by-step guide to doing social audits or community profiles, and claims to constitute ‘a distillation of the knowledge, skills, expertise and experience of a much wider group of people’.

Could this be the holy grail everyone is looking for? The definitive How To guide?

The authors, three academics from Leeds Metropolitan University, start by explaining what they mean by a community profile. Their first chapter ends with a neat description of a community profile which emphasises ‘active involvement of the community itself, for the purpose of developing an action plan’. So far, so good.

Next they travel down the road of information gathering, methodology, and analysing information, and are on firm ground for a while. But then they start to lose it.

A basic flaw is the lack of any discussion about ownership. Who owns a community profile? Where is the power? Without answers to these questions it is hard to find the right direction, or ways to translate theory into action. The book is also thin on community development and participatory research methods.

But any community-led research must start with ‘lay’ viewpoints, which in turn inform and decide the route to be taken. Sadly, there is no magic formula because each community is different, its needs are not constant and nor are they conveniently there to be re-evaluated at some future date. Involving communities in any meaningful way takes a long time.

I found the authors’ tone difficult. Communities seem to exist to be consulted at best, and manipulated at worst. The authors advocate observation — overt or covert — as an information-gathering technique. For example, they suggest the researcher might better observe a mother and toddler group and even gain the group’s trust by not only joining but also taking along their own toddler — while not letting on what they are up to. Is this really community involvement? What’s wrong with just asking people their views openly?

The book’s background research is incomplete and outdated. The bibliography includes hardly any of the vast number of community health projects carried out in the UK, and a look at the work done in other countries would also have been worthwhile.

It is hard to find a book which covers the whole range of issues involved in community surveying, and this isn’t it. Its content does not, in the end, match up to its introductory promise. It is a book by academics for students and researchers, rather than the definitive guide for everyone.