Date: Tuesday, April 7, 2026
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
I am Sachu R. Sunny, a RiseUp! alumna and a doctoral scholar in social sciences. I was recently engaged as a young woman co-researcher in the RiseUp! Asia Pacific Formative Evaluation. RiseUp! Young Women’s Leadership and Advocacy Initiative in Asia and the Pacific is a flagship initiative of World YWCA, in partnership with the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade gender equality initiatives. The evaluation was a deep collaboration between World YWCA, Elevating Voices for Change, The Mangrove Collective, YWCA member associations, and RiseUp! alumni. The evaluation was grounded in World YWCA’s Feminist Consultation Methodology, centering young women as co-researchers in data collection and sense-making.
I entered this evaluation with long-standing skepticism: how can numbers capture lived experiences? As a qualitative researcher, I often trust stories more than scales in capturing the nuances of human life. When I began the evaluation process using a Change Scale Matrix, which invites participants to place themselves on a scale to reflect the change over time, I questioned the purpose of asking the young women to rate shifts in their lives. Why reduce it to numbers when we already have an option of capturing powerful stories through the tool, the most significant story?
My position as a RiseUp! alumna and a researcher complicated my facilitation of the evaluation process. The participants did not see me as a distant evaluator, as I had walked a similar journey. They did not perform a transformation or exaggerate their growth for me. Instead, they spoke candidly about the changes in their lives. The researcher in me appreciated this reduced distance between the evaluator and participants. But it also created tensions within me. A part of me wanted to hear strong stories of impact. The other part wished for honest insights about what was working and what needed attention.
Unexpectedly, the numbers challenged me to consider what I thought I knew about them. When the participants placed their lives on scales, it was not the end as I believed. But it was an opening door to the real data that surfaced through the conversations that followed.
Why did someone give a three instead of a five? What changed between two in the past and three in the present? This shift cannot be interpreted without context. For some, it can be about incremental growth, while for others, it may be an awareness of the structural constraints that shape their lives. As researchers, we must reflect on and highlight these differences rather than assume that every shift has the same meaning. Even when the numbers never moved or showed any dramatic progress, stories uncovered subtle but meaningful shifts, including increased confidence in classroom participation, initiating difficult conversations with family, or offering support to a friend.
The scale gave an opportunity for reflection, which helped participants identify changes in their lives they may otherwise consider small or insignificant. While they listened to each other, some changed their ratings. The changes one may consider ordinary gained new and sometimes greater meaning when reflected by others. I was unprepared for the moment when numbers no longer remained numbers or an individual score but became dialogue and collective memory.
This experience has reshaped how I listen, interpret, and write about lived experiences in my academic work. While my doctoral research on caregiving is primarily based on qualitative narratives, I have started paying closer attention to recurring patterns in everyday caregiving tasks and also to small shifts families describe over time. I realize that hearing lives through numbers is possible when the quantitative and qualitative approaches are allowed to work together rather than in opposition.
Learn more about the evaluation here.
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