Some useful questions are:

What are the stated goals? What are the stated values? How are these to be reached? What specific activities are planned? What actually happens? When and where? Do these five sets of facts seem consistent? Are there inconsistencies? Are there direct results? Indirect results? Unexpected results? Delayed results?

Who is involved at all stages of the various activities? Who plans? Who is on the receiving end? What are their defining characteristics? What resources are involved? How many? How much? Where do these come from? How are they obtained?

All the above questions can be asked and answered about the past and the present. Questions about the future can be formulated, but any answers obtained before the actual event are based on speculation.

It is useful to ask the negative form of all these questions as well as the affirmative form. "Who is not involved?" and "What did not happen?" may be just as useful for policy development and advocacy work as the affirmative questions. Any "Why not?" is just as not useful as "Why?".

c.) Gather the information (Preliminary action step)

• this is the question-answering step.
• utilize all resources available.
• repeat steps a, b, and c until all pertinent information has
     been collected. New questions may arise in this process and
     should be included. For this report we repeated this step
     at minimum of 3 times for each unit.

d .) Describe the parts (Problem description; analysis)

• collate all information and use this to describe the past and
    current state of the problem area through:

     - statistical tables
     - research summaries
     - policy statements
     - guidelines statements
     - specific instances of practices
     - other observations

• comments can be added at this time but this step is most useful when value judgments which focus on good/bad, right/wrong, best/worst, etc. are suspended. Such judgments tend to close the investigation too soon, before all possible analyses can be contemplated. Positive judgments and agreement are just as likely to cause closure as negative judgments and disagreement. The major focus here should be on whether the descriptions are as true a set of statements as can be obtained and are reasonably consistent with a mutually acceptable "reality". Where there is no agreement about a mutual reality, this should be note in the description.