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Date/Time
Date(s) - 01/11/2021 - 05/11/2021
All Day

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“There is nothing as practical as a good theory”. This phrase, purportedly coined by Kurt Lewin in the 1940s and later taken up inter alia by Carol Weiss and Ray Pawson resonates well with most evaluators and development practitioners nowadays.

While having been around for more than four decades, over the last decade theory-based evaluation has received new impetus and today is part and parcel of the toolkit of program evaluators across the globe. Most notably, new methodological developments in theory-based causal analysis are increasingly exploited to answer key causal questions that do not lend themselves to (quasi) experimental design. While theory-based causal analysis is not-method specific—it can be embedded in a variety of quantitative and qualitative approaches—the application of qualitative or quali-quantitative theory-based methods is particularly promising.

This workshop covers the following topics: review of various causal theories and their affiliated theory-based evaluation methods; principles for selecting the right design; fundamentals of designing a theory-based causal analysis; applications of theory-based evaluation for causal analysis using three case-based approaches: (1) process tracing; (2) pattern-matching; (3) Qualitative Comparative Analysis. Examples from World Bank evaluations as well as other organizations are used throughout the workshop to illustrate the content. The workshop applies a combination of short lectures, group exercises, and group and plenary discussions.

For more information please click here: https://ipdet.org/event/2021-online-program-theory-based-causal-analysis/