Table 1 Underpinning principles and variations to REM

 1. Appreciative inquiry

Appreciative inquiry is an approach to creating generative knowledge, whereby stakeholders come together to reflect upon an issue or intervention, and to collectively think through what the future could look like – helping to establish energy and momentum amongst a group. Four phases of appreciative inquiry are often referred to: discovering, dreaming, designing, and delivery/destiny. REM predominantly focuses on the discovery phase.

 2. Participatory approach

Stakeholders are seen as a core, active part of the evaluation rather than a unit of inquiry or recipient of an evaluation report.

 3. Group interviewing and reflection

Data is gathered via participatory and interactive methods. This often includes stakeholders working together to create a shared understanding of what happened within an intervention. This takes the form of peer semi-structured interviews or focus groups. Reflecting on these conversations can also stimulate new ways of working between stakeholders involved in the REM.

 4. Mind mapping

The resultant discussion between stakeholders is captured through diagrammatic processes, akin to that of a mind map, whereby the relationships between concepts are captured and organised in a hierarchical manner.

 1. Web-mapping

Use a predetermined framework or theory to map short-, medium- and long-term impacts against. Recommends the use of the Community Capitals Framework.

 2. In-depth rippling

The group focus on their perceived most important and impactful chains of events. A framework is not used to guide the group discussion but may be used to facilitate the analysis of the output.

 3. Theming and rippling

The group collect impacts from all participants initially, and then generate themes from these impacts within the workshop. The wider impacts, or ripples, are then examined after themes are generated.