Mixed-Methods Tools for Program Co-Design, Iteration, and Assessment for a Guaranteed Income Program

This report is a result of the collaborative partnership between the Black Women’s Resilience Project (BWRP) and the Sage Project at San Diego State University (SDSU). The BWRP, a project sponsored by Jewish Family Service of San Diego (JFSSD), is a guaranteed income (GI) program intended to uplift low-income Black women and their families out of poverty by targeting the challenges they face. Research contained in this report was conducted as part of Dr. Kristen Maher’s Fall 2024 Political Science Seminar in Foundations of Public Policy (POL S 603) class at SDSU. The POL S 603 course focused on the theory and practice of policy-making, which comprises the design, agenda setting, tools, and implementation process. Students who opted to participate were tasked with exploring, researching and evaluating methods for tracking the project’s impact. The aim was gathering participant experiences and assessing the effects of the project. This report provides an overview of mixed-methods research and assessment approaches through a Participatory Action Research (PAR) framework, including a discussion of the affordances and constraints of narrative research, Photovoice, and community mapping methods.