BH TIG Week: Collaboration on a Budget by Elizabeth Oyer

Leave a Comment / Behavioral Health, Uncategorized / October 4, 2021

Hello! I am Elizabeth Oyer, President of EvalSolutions, Inc. (www.evalsolutions.com) where I provide consulting services for personalized operations support as well as program evaluation.  I would like to share some lessons I’ve learned about working collaboratively with my clients to manage our shared projects more efficiently, securely, and productively in a virtual space. As an …

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BH TIG Week: Evaluating the emotion behind words by Jonathan Scaccia

Leave a Comment / Behavioral Health, Qualitative Methods / October 4, 2021

Hi!  I’m Jonathan Scaccia, principal of the evaluation firm The Dawn Chorus Group and founder of PubTrawlr. What connects these two strands of work is finding better ways to efficiently and effectively extract meaning from text-based data. There is so much qualitative data out there that is laborious to analyze. Techniques from Natural Language Processing …

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The Ten Commandments for Evaluation Research Assistants (Part II) by Arena Lam & Anthony Petrosino

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized / October 8, 2021

We are Arena Lam (Research Associate) and Anthony Petrosino (Director) from WestEd’s Justice & Prevention Research Center (JPRC). Our organization conducts evaluations and employs many research assistants. We’re often asked by prospective job candidates or newly hired folks what the most important qualities are in successful assistants. This is Part II of a 2-part series …

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The Ten Commandments for Evaluation Research Assistants (Part I) by Anthony Petrosino & Arena Lam

1 Comment / Uncategorized / October 8, 2021

We are Anthony Petrosino (Director) and Arena Lam (Research Associate) from WestEd’s Justice & Prevention Research Center (JPRC). Our organization conducts many evaluations, and we so value our research assistants. Being a research assistant is often the first step to launching a research career. We’re often asked by job candidates or new employees what the …

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Seven tips to decolonize your MEL practice, by Sabine Topolansky and JulieAnn Sickell

1 Comment / Uncategorized / September 12, 2021

We are Sabine Topolansky and JulieAnn Sickell, monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) professionals with the International Republican Institute (IRI), a non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to advancing democracy and governance worldwide. Though not experts on decolonizing evaluation, we recently reflected on our practices and identified 7 Hot Tips to decolonize MEL:   Hot Tips: Acknowledge MEL’s …

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Using Performance Management Principles and Metrics to Build Evaluation Capacity by Disa Patel

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized / September 12, 2021

Hi! I’m Disa Patel and I work at the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families (DCF). One of my favorite roles is building evaluation capacity throughout the department. Currently, I’m leading a project called Metrics that Matter to help my division’s teams identify, well, metrics that matter to them. Cool Trick: Talk in a language …

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Podcasting as Evaluators by Nora Nemeth

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized / September 12, 2021

Greetings, fellow evaluators! My name is Nora Nemeth, and I am a member of the Research, Evaluation, and Learning Team at the Institute of International Education (IIE). I am based out of the Budapest, Hungary office. One of the most inspiring aspects of my work is having the opportunity to directly hear from grantees of international scholarships and fellowships and learn about their trajectories and their impact on their communities. In collaboration …

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Hierarchical Card Sorting (HCS) – a simple tool for qualitative inquiry by Rick Davies

3 Comments / Uncategorized / August 30, 2021

Hi, I’m Rick Davies, an evaluation consultant based in Cambridge, United Kingdom. What is it: Card (or pile) sorting is a method used by ethnographers to elicit people’s mental models: the categories they use, what belongs to these categories, and how the categories relate to each other. Hierarchical Card Sorting (HCS) is a variant I …

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MSI Fellowship Week: The importance and value of self-reflection by Arthur Hernandez

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized / September 19, 2021

My name is Arthur Hernández, and I am a Professor at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio Texas. Even before I knew it, I was an evaluator (albeit not a very good one!) considering my process and consequences related to my teaching, research/evaluation, and service. Now mostly, I’m interested in the means and mechanisms …

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