It’s a fact that’s often hiding in plain sight: community members closest to the issues at hand are often the best equipped to inform priorities, suggest solutions, and generate strategies for addressing those issues. But too often, community perspectives are an afterthought. And the richness of narrative perspectives—where people’s thoughts aren’t simply reduced to numbers and statistics, but are given full voice, in their own words—sometimes fall to the wayside.

At JLI Consulting, we conduct qualitative community research, such as focus groups and interviews, that captures texture that can be lost in working with quantitative data alone. Through analysis of stories, anecdotes, and discussion, we identify overarching themes and reveal nuances that can be difficult for closed-ended data to reflect.

On this page, you can check out two examples of our community-informed approach to better understanding complex issues. Joyce co-authored Touchpoints of Homelessness: Institutional Discharge as a Window of Opportunity for Hawaiʻi’s Homeless (left), which analyzes emancipation from foster care, discharge from hospitals and emergency rooms, and release from incarceration as potential avenues for intervention and prevention of homelessness in Hawaiʻi. Joyce was also co-author of Island of Possibility: A Landscape Study of the Performing Arts Sectors of Hawaiʻi Island (below, left), which built on interviews, focus groups, and survey data to illuminate the unique strengths and opportunities for growth within Hawaiʻi Island's performing arts communities.