The European Evaluation Society (EES) and ICF are organising on 4 July 2019, for the third time, a peer-to-peer event dedicated to evaluation and impact assessment under the Better Regulation guidelines. The event is aimed at Commission and Agency staff working on or interested in evaluations, impact assessments and fitness checks, and evaluation specialists, to exchange experiences, good practices and lessons learned.

This third event will focus on the use of ‘Big Data’ in evaluations. Increasingly, evaluators are looking beyond traditional primary and secondary data collection methods to new data sources, to strengthen the (quantitative) evidence of the effects of an intervention, especially where these are difficult and/or costly to assess through traditional ways. Amongst those most often used to date are administrative data and social media, but evaluators have also been experimenting with extracting, clustering and analysing information that is otherwise not structured or available in existing databases (e.g. web crawling, data mining), as well as combining multiple data sources.

Professor Lars Lyberg, from Statistics Sweden, and Dr Katerina Mantouvalou, from ICF, will discuss their experience with big data in evaluations – the opportunities, challenges and future prospects.

Questions for discussion will include:

• What are the opportunities and challenges of using Big Data in evaluations?
• What methodologies are being used to collect and analyse Big Data in evaluations?
• How can Big Data best be used in combination with other data sources?
• What does this mean for those commissioning evaluations?

Would you like to co-sponsor an event with the EES?

Please contact secretariat@europeanevaluation.org