Who feels the collaboration?

In my last post, I shared the subset of survey results concerning fairness in collaborative networks. In this post, I share some preliminary findings regarding collaboration: whether stakeholders feel its happening, whether they think it improves outcomes, whether they feel the network shares a common goal, and whether they themselves feel they participate in the network.

More good news

As with perceptions of fairness, the overwhelming majority of respondents to the survey feel their networks are collaborative spaces, that the collaboration makes them more effective, and that everyone is working toward a shared goal. The statements presented to respondents were adapted from ones administered to the RE-AMP Network by Peter Plastrik and Chinwe Onyeagoro as part of an outside evaluation a few years back. Because I wanted to be able to tie people's self-assessed level of participation to other aspects of the survey, I added a question asking people if they actively participate. Most respondents do see themselves as active participants in the network. 

The bar chart below shows the percent of respondents from each demographic that said they "strongly agree" with the statement about collaboration, later I'll show you a broader spectrum of data. 

Percent of respondents who strongly agree with statements about collaboration in their network.
*While we generally want a sample size of at least 30 for statistical significance, only 28 men responded to the bottom three statements, and only 27 responded to the top statement. The sample size for those in a racial minority is 12, and for men who are a gender minority, the sample size is 10.

As you can see (or maybe you can't if you are looking at this on a mobile device), about a third of all respondents strongly agree that the network collaboration helps them be more effective. Slightly more than that strongly agree that they have a shared purpose. More still strongly agree that they have a highly collaborative experience in the network, though some interesting differences between demographics appear.

A gender distinction

As with perceptions of fairness, the subgroups of respondents that seem to be the most different are men and women. I don't want to make too much of this, since we can see that both groups seem to view their networks as collaborative places, but the subtle difference is quite interesting. Take, for example, the statement about the network being a highly collaborative place. 

In the bar chart below, we see that nearly 60% of men strongly agree with the statement, compared to just under 40% of women. However, 100% of women at least agree more than disagree with the statement, whereas only about 85% of men have some level of agreement. Although this particular question is the one where this pattern shows up most strongly, it holds for all the responses: men are more likely than women to either strongly agree or to disagree with the statement.

This is where the small sample size really becomes a challenge. When we are talking about only 28 men altogether, then it's hard to say if this is just a data blip, or if it is pointing us toward something useful. In the coming weeks I will be hosting some group conversations with network practitioners to try to understand if it's productive to dig into these differences. I will also be looking at the open-ended responses from the survey for clues to the direction members want their networks to take. Do feel free to reach out to me with your own interpretation as well.