Contents

now’, which required them to remember community life three years prior and make comparisons to the current day. Such judgements are open to a range of issues concerning memory and recall. Finally, the survey items were designed with concerns around the survey’s length and complexity, which meant that many areas could not be assessed in detail. In the next section we look more closely at whether there is evidence to support these predictions that emerge from the alignment between the CYWR trial and current social psychological theory and research, and social and behavioural change processes.

### 5.5 of social change survey data, with a focus on 5.5 of social change survey data, with a focus on the FRC, leadership and responsibility

#### 5.5.1 strategy 5.5.1 strategy

The analysis strategy involved a number of stages that included two steps. Step 1: Developing appropriate and statistically reliable measures of key variables (e.g. endorsement of the FRC, leadership, responsibility, perceptions of behaviour change, current behaviour) and providing descriptive statistics (means, standard deviations, distributions) for those variables. Regarding the formation of scales described in tables 5.3 and 5.4, using reliability analysis it is possible to assess the relationships between individual survey items or questions to determine whether they are measuring the same underlying construct. So, for example, responses to three separate questions deemed to be measuring FRC endorsement (‘I want the FRC to keep helping people’, ‘I support people in this community when they are being helped by the FRC’, and ‘I was not sure about the FRC when it first came in but now I see they are good for the community’) were first tested for reliability—whether or not they form a reliable overall measure of this construct. A reliable scale is composed of items that have a similar pattern of responses for each participant (e.g. if a person is someone who highly endorses the FRC, their ratings of each separate question measuring FRC endorsement should also be high). A reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s alpha) greater than .65 indicates that the items reliably measure an underlying construct. For FRC endorsement, a Cronbach’s alpha of .93 indicates very high reliability and means that participants’ responses were very similar across each of the three items, warranting the creation of the FRC endorsement scale. The scale was constructed by averaging participants’ responses on the three separate ‘FRC endorsement’ items, giving us an overall assessment of the extent to which each participant endorses the FRC. Step 2: Hierarchical regression (and logistic regression for variables with categorical response options such as ‘more’, ‘less’, ‘on the way up’, ‘on the way down’, ‘about the same’) was used to investigate whether some explanatory variables (FRC endorsement, leadership, responsibility) are stronger or better predictors of outcome variables (perceptions of behaviour change, current behaviour). This is achieved by testing models in which explanatory variables compete with each other for predictive power in a given outcome. Correlational data are also to be reported.

#### 5.5.2 explanatory and outcome variables 5.5.2 explanatory and outcome variables

Before discussing the findings in more detail, it is necessary to define key explanatory and outcome variables. The explanatory variables centre on concepts of Indigenous leadership and internalisation of personal/family responsibility, in line with the trial logic and related social psychological research, and include FRC endorsement, leadership and individual/family responsibility (see Table 5.2).

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