Now that you have started developing your evaluation design, how are you going to collect the necessary information that will give you the answers to your questions? Is there preliminary or baseline data on the program participants or beneficiaries of the program? Are both the incidence and prevalence of the problems your program is designed to address well documented? What types of data are appropriate for your evaluation? What are your variables of interest and how are you going to measure these?
Evaluations rely heavily on data. The good news is that you have a variety of methods that can be used to collect the data. The data can be baseline data, secondary data, surveys, censuses, case studies, and qualitative information. However, data collection issues such as data quality, coverage, costs, and ethics are major considerations in any data collection effort.
The Learning Resources this week will focus on problems having to do with collecting data, given specific evaluation designs, measures, indicators of concepts of interest, and relevant units of observation. You will also concentrate on issues having to do with measurement and the selection of units of analysis.
0 comments