I am Susan Kistler, the American Evaluation Association’s Executive Director Emeritus and aea365’s regular Saturday contributor.
Rad Resource – American Evaluation Association’s LinkedIn Group: AEA’s LinkedIn group is open to members and nonmembers alike from around the world and currently welcomes over 11,000 colleagues to the community exchange.
Lessons Learned – What is LinkedIn: At its most basic level, LinkedIn is a website dedicated to bringing together those with a common interest into groups for discussion and networking. Joining is free and there are thousands of “groups” within LinkedIn, AEA’s being only one. Once you have set up a free LinkedIn account, you may then join up to fifty groups. Here are just a few that may be of interest to evaluators:
- African Evaluation Association (AfrEA) – focusing on colleagues living and working in Africa, this new site hosted by AfrEA just recently came online
- American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) – great discussions in particular for those conducting surveys or in need of sampling guidance
- Environmental Evaluators Network (EEN) – our colleagues at EEN use this open group as their primary forum for exchange around environmental evaluation issues
- Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Evaluation – hosted by the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group, here you can discuss work with SME’s and also contribute to the group’s study of SME evaluation
Lessons Learned – What types of things are discussed on LinkedIn: LinkedIn discussions are threaded, meaning that a discussion stays together and may be contributed to over the course of many days or even weeks or months. Here are a couple of recent discussions on AEA’s LinkedIn Group (feel free to join in and add to the exchange):
- Marcela asked “I am looking for a five point scale to measure improvement. I am currently using: None, Slight, Some, Much, Huge, but my client doesn’t like it. Any suggestions?” and 35 responses offered suggestions, raised further questions, and refined thinking on the topic
- Mary Alice asked “Does anyone have any experience assessing changes in non-academic skills (attitude, resiliency, motivation, consciousness, grit, etc) in high school age youth. Preferably, I am looking for an assessment that could be used in a pre/post format…” and 23 posts contributed to the exchange
- Katherine asked “Anyone got suggestions for [affordable] stat packages that I might consider as an alternative [to SPSS and SAS] for my own consulting work?” and 24 people shared their expertise
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Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
We actually are looking for others who use Linked In as a data source. We want to use it as a secondary data source when determining the career pathways of our most recent graduates. We do survey them and have an extensive plan for getting a good response rate, and we believe that data from Linked In may be a good source of information for survey nonrespondents. We have developed a draft protocol for how to search for info on our most recent graduates, and would love to know if others are doing something similar with LinkedIn or other social media sources.