Date/Time
Date(s) - 23/03/2026 - 25/03/2026
0:00
Categories
The Evaluators’ Institute (TEI)
23/3/26 – 25/3/26
Successful evaluation depends on our ability to generate evidence attesting to the feasibility, relevance/effectiveness of the interventions, services, or products we study. While theory guides our designs and how we organize our work, it is measurement that provides the evidence we use in making judgments about the quality of what we evaluate. Measurement, whether it results from self-report survey, interview/focus groups, observation, document review, or administrative data must be systematic, replicable, interpretable, reliable, and valid. While hard sciences such as physics and engineering have advanced precise and accurate measurement, the measurement used in evaluation studies is often imprecise and characterized by considerable error.
The quality of the inferences made in evaluation studies is directly related to the quality of the measurement on which we base our judgments. Judgments attesting to the ineffective interventions may be flawed – the reflection of measures that are imprecise and not sensitive to the characteristics we chose to evaluate. Evaluation attempts to compensate for imprecise measurement with increasingly sophisticated statistical procedures to manipulate data. The emphasis on statistical analysis all too often obscures the important characteristics of the measures we choose.
This course would be of interest and benefit to anyone using quantitative (e.g., surveys, etc.) or qualitative (interviews, focus groups, etc.) measurement in their evaluations.