Qualitative Methods

Using KUMU for Visualizing Interview Data by Bernadette Wright

Good day, I’m Bernadette Wright, program evaluator with Meaningful Evidence, LLC. Conducting interviews as part of a program evaluation is a great way better understand the specific situation from stakeholders’ perspectives. Online, interactive maps are a useful technique for presenting findings from that qualitative data to inform action for organization leaders who are working to …

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SEA Professional Development Week: Dr. Moya Alfonso on Becoming a Well-Trained Focus Group Moderator

My name is Dr. Moya Alfonso, MSPH, and I’m an Associate Professor at Georgia Southern University and University Sector Representative and Board Member for the Southeast Evaluation Association (SEA). So you want to be an evaluator but you’re unfamiliar how to moderate focus group discussions – a key qualitative approach involved with formative, process, and …

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Conference Presenters Week: Lynne Franco and Jonathan Jones on Supercharging your focus groups!

We are Lynne Franco: Vice President for Technical Assistance and Evaluation at EnCompass LLC, and Jonathan Jones: Senior Monitoring and Evaluation Technical Advisor with CAMRIS International. Jonathan is also co-chair of AEA‘s International and Cross Cultural TIG. Focus groups are an important tool in the data collection tool box, allowing the evaluator to explore peoples’ …

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2-for-1 Week: Sebastian Lemire on Causation Coding

My name is Sebastian. Before pursuing my PhD at UCLA, I served as a senior evaluation consultant at Ramboll Management – a Copenhagen-based consulting firm. My current interests revolve around research syntheses and causal modeling techniques. A common practice in evaluation is to examine the existing body of evidence of the type of intervention to …

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Galen Ellis on Virtual Meeting Spaces: Minefields to Gold Mines

Greetings! I’m Galen Ellis, President of Ellis Planning Associates Inc., which has long specialized in participatory planning and evaluation services. In online meeting spaces, we’ve learned to facilitate group participation that – in the right circumstances – can be even more meaningful than in person. But we had to adapt. Although I knew deep inside …

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Myia Welsh on Conducting Focus Groups with Trauma Survivors

Hi! I’m Myia Welsh, an independent consultant working with nonprofit and community organizations. Much of my work is done with organizations that provide services to survivors of human trafficking. What’s that, you ask? Trafficking is any enterprise where someone makes a profit from the exploitation of another by force, fraud or coercion. Just like the …

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Lisa Melchior on Developing, Sharing, and Storing Lessons Learned from Evaluations

Hi, I’m Lisa Melchior, President of The Measurement Group LLC, a consulting firm focused on the evaluation of health and social services for at-risk and vulnerable populations. In response to Sheila B. Robinson’s recent post that reported what AEA 365 readers said they want to see in 2015, I’m writing about developing, sharing, and storing …

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Developmental Eval Week: Nora F. Murphy on Qualitative Data in Developmental Evaluation

Hi, I’m Nora F. Murphy, a developmental evaluator and co-founder of TerraLuna Collaborative. Qualitative Methods have been a critical component of every developmental evaluation I have been a part of. Over the years I’ve learned a few tricks about making qualitative methods work in a developmental evaluation context. Hot Tip: Apply systems thinking. When using developmental evaluation …

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QUAL Eval Week: Eric Barela on providing a detailed description of qualitative inquiry choices and processes to clients

Hello, I’m Eric Barela, another of the co-leaders of the Qualitative Methods TIG, and a co-editor with Leslie Goodyear, Jennifer Jewiss, and Janet Usinger of a new book about qualitative evaluation called Qualitative Inquiry in Evaluation: From Theory to Practice (2014, Jossey-Bass). In my time as an evaluator, I have noticed that discussions of methodology …

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QUAL Eval Week: Michael Quinn Patton on Practical Qualitative Analysis

My name is Michael Quinn Patton. I train evaluators in qualitative evaluation methods and analysis. Qualitative interviews, open-ended survey questions, and social media entries can yield massive amounts of raw data. Course participants ask: “How can qualitative data be analyzed quickly, efficiently, and credibly to provide timely feedback to stakeholders? How do every day program evaluators …

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