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Qualitative Methods

Designing your Focus Group Questions and Questioning Route by Beverly Peters

Hello again! I am Beverly Peters, assistant professor of Measurement and Evaluation at American University. This is the fourth article in a 6-part series on Using Focus Groups for Monitoring and Evaluation. The third article discussed populating a focus group—a very important yet challenging aspect of focus groups. This article will discuss an equally challenging and …

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Populating a Focus Group by Beverly Peters

Greetings! I am Beverly Peters, assistant professor of Measurement and Evaluation at American University. This is the third article in a 6-part series on Using Focus Groups for Monitoring and Evaluation. The second article discussed planning the focus group. This article will go more in depth into a very important part of focus group planning: populating …

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Focus Group Planning by Beverly Peters

Hello again! I am Beverly Peters, assistant professor of Measurement and Evaluation at American University. This is the second article in a 6-part series on Using Focus Groups for Monitoring and Evaluation. In the first article, we learned that focus groups are an appropriate data collection tool when the topic or evaluation question would benefit from …

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Focus Groups: The Right Tool for Me? By Beverly Peters

Greetings! I am Beverly Peters, assistant professor of Measurement and Evaluation at American University. I have over 25 years of experience teaching, researching, and designing, implementing, and evaluating community development and governance projects, mainly in southern Africa. I have spent the bulk of my career using qualitative methods to evaluate projects; and write a blog for …

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Attending to nuance with Qualitative Comparative Analysis by Maureen Hawes, Arlene Russell and Jason Altman

Hello! We are Maureen Hawes from the University of Minnesota’s Systems Improvement Group, Arlene Russell, independent consultant, and Jason Altman from the TerraLuna Collaborative. We are writing to share our experience with fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). You may have faced questions similar to ones that we grappled with as evaluators, using quantitative analysis …

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Graphic Recording as an evaluation tool in community engaged research by Clara Pelfrey, Johnine Byrne and Darcy Freedman

Hello! I’m Clara Pelfrey, Translational Research Evaluation TIG past chair and evaluator for the Clinical and Translation Science Collaborative at Case Western Reserve University. I’m joined by graphic recorder Johnine Byrne, owner of See Your Words, and Darcy Freedman, Associate Director of the Prevention Research Center for Healthy Neighborhoods (PRCHN). We’d like to extend our …

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Lesson Learned: Teaching Trust Alumni Network’s Qualitative Work by Anupama Shekar and Matt Pierson

Hi, we are Dr. Anupama Shekar, Director of Evaluation and Dr. Matt Pierson, Program Officer, Alumni Network at Teaching Trust, an education leadership nonprofit in Dallas, Texas. Teaching Trust offers high-quality training and support to future school leaders, school leadership teams, and teacher leaders to ensure children in low-income schools across North Texas have access to …

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Creating Solid Interview Guides by Laura Sefton and Linda Cabral

Greetings! We are Laura Sefton from the University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Center for Health Policy and Research and Linda Cabral from Care Transformation Collaborative-Rhode Island. When choosing qualitative interviews as the data collection method for your evaluation project, developing an appropriate interview guide is key to gathering the information you need. The interviews should …

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Best of AEA365: Fatima Frank and Greg Lestikow on Using a Participatory Ranking Methodology in Focus Groups for Sensitive Topics

Hello, we are Greg Lestikow, CEO and Fatima Frank, Project Manager of evalû, a small consulting firm that focuses exclusively on rigorous evaluations of social and economic development initiatives.  We champion impact evaluation that maintains academic rigor but is based entirely on our clients’ need to improve strategic and operational effectiveness and increase profitability. In …

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EPE TIG Week: Two Social Justice Lessons for Environmental Program Evaluators by Marti Frank

I’m Marti Frank, a researcher and evaluator based in Portland, Oregon. Over the last three years I’ve worked in the energy efficiency and social justice worlds, and it’s given me the opportunity to see how much these fields have to teach one another. For evaluators working with environmental programs – and energy efficiency in particular …

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