Observing Civic Engagement: Using Systematic Social Observation to Study Civil Society Organization Convenings

What happens at convenings held by community-based civil society organizations and how do they influence organizational outcomes? Although ethnographies provide details about organizations’ internal dynamics, they offer limited insights into the distribution of those dynamics and their impact on outcomes. This article describes systematic social observation and explains how we adapted this method to CSOs for collecting data on multiple convenings from several organizations. To demonstrate the method’s viability, we digitized our SSO tool and used it in a pilot study of three CSOs in Indianapolis to collect observational data from 99 convenings. We illustrate the value of SSO for studying CSOs by presenting distributions of interaction styles and cross-demographic interaction across organizations. We note how such data could be combined with survey and administrative data to analyze the impact of CSOs internal dynamics on organizational outcomes. We conclude by discussing the broader utility and limitations of the SSO method for research on CSOs and the third sector.