The Research | WeValue

The WeValue approach is based on rigorous research, and continues to be iteratively developed through a series of projects and collaborations led by the Values and Sustainability Research Group at the University of Brighton.

Formal research projects
The WeValue approach continues to be enhanced through the development of values-based indicators for higher education, schools, healthcare, and collaborative research and ongoing consultancy projects. Visit links below to find out more about related research projects.

ESDInds project: Indicators and assessment tools for civil society organisations promoting Education for Sustainable Development. The original proof-of-concept project which had 10+ sub-projects worldwide and multiple exploratory outputs (EU-FP7 funded).
Starting from Values: Evaluating intangible legacies Explored a new approach to investigating legacies, and new findings and methods for the approach. Involved 10+ UK sub-projects (AHRC funded).
Values as a bridge between sustainability and institutional assessment in universities. Used in an Austrian university to explore institutional values and sustainability (StartClim funded).
Cultivating Compassionate Care. Development of compassion indicators through story-telling in the UK National Health Service (funded by HEKSS).
PERL project: Partnerhip for Education and research about Responsibe Living. An exploration of the use of values as a starting point to consider and develop measure for sustainability in schools (EU Erasmus funded).

Published research relating to the development and use of the WeValue approach
An overview of the EU project and its co-inception:

Podger, D., Piggot, G., Zahradnik, M., Janouskova, S., Velasco, I., Hak, T., Dahl, A., Jimenez, A., & Harder, M.K. (2010). The Earth Charter and the ESDinds initiative: developing indicators and assessment tools for civil society organisations to examine the values dimensions of sustainability projects. Journal of Education for Sustainable Development, 4(2), 297-305.

The setting out of the WeValue approach as an evaluation approach, with results from three studies:

Burford, G., Velasco, I., Janouskova, S., Zahradnik, M., Hak, T., Podger, D., Piggot, G., & Harder, M.K. (2013). Field trials of a novel toolkit for evaluating ‘intangible’ values-related dimensions of projects. Evaluation and Program Planning, 36(1), 1-14.

An outline of the development of the initial menu of ‘triggers’ and the scaling up of the WeValue approach for monitoring and evaluation to a multi-layered national environmental program:

Podger, D., Hoover, E., Burford, G., Hak, T., Harder, M.K. (2015). Revealing values in a complex environmental program: a scaling up of values-based indicators. Journal of Cleaner Production (in press)

Using the WeValue approach in evaluating values in civil society organisation work, including an explanation of the validity considerations – especially face-validity – used to ensure the peer elicitation approach was rigorous was presented in a paper using an environmental CSO context:

Podger, D., Velasco, I., Amezcua Luna, C., Burford, G., & Harder, M. K. (2013). Can values be measured? Significant contributions from a small civil society organisation through action research evaluation. Action Research, 11(1), 8-30. DOI:10.1177/1476750312467833.
Harder, M. K., Velasco, I., Burford, G., Podger, D., Janoušková, S., Piggot, G., & Hoover, E. (2014) Reconceptualizing ‘effectiveness’ in environmental projects: Can we measure values-related achievements? Journal of Environmental Management, 139, 120-134.

Ouline of the adapted methodology for developing values-based indicators in Higher Education, and their usefulness for sustainability institutional assessment:

Ribeiro, M.M., Hoover, E., Burford, G., Buchebner, J., Lindenthal, T. (2016) Values: a bridge between sustainability and institutional assessment – a case study from BOKU University. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education 17(1) 40-53.

An analysis of identificable outcomes due to the use of our participatory evaluative approach across 8 organisations has been submitted to a Business peer reviewed journal and is available as a Working Paper:

Burford, G., Stapleton, L. M., Podger, D., Velasco, I., Zahradnik, M., Hoover, E., Dahl., A.L., & Harder*, M. K. (2013). From abstract values to concrete indicators: values-based performance assessment as a catalyst for organizational change. Working Paper. www.esdlinds.eu

Immediate implications we see for Sustainable Development Goals from the WeValue approach:

G Burford, E Hoover, I Velasco, S Janoušková, A Jimenez, G Piggot,Podger D, Harder MK. (2013) Bringing the “missing pillar” into sustainable development goals: Towards intersubjective values-based indicators. Sustainability 5 (7), 3035-3059.

Below is an article where we drew out the many lessons we learned about participation at different levels and in different dimensions, and which we are now building into a new cross-disciplinary framework of paticipation:

Harder, M. K., Burford, G., & Hoover, E. (2013) What is participation? Design leads the way to a cross-disciplinary framework. Design Issues 29: 4 , pg 41-57.

Exploring the contribution of a values-based approach to developing indicators compared to the conventional approach currently used:

Burford, G., Tamás, P., & Harder, M. K., (2016) Can we improve indicator design for complex sustainable development goals? A Comparison of a Values-Based and Conventional Approach Sustainability 8 (9), pg 1-38.

Here we uncover the impacts of our pragmatic values-based evaluation approach across eight organisations:

Burford, G., Hoover, E., Stapleton, L., & Harder, M. K., (2016) An Unexpected Means of Embedding Ethics in Organizations: Preliminary Findings from Values-Based Evaluations Sustainability 8 (7), pg 1-22.