Publications

This blog has been quiet because we have completed our review and our presentations!
But there are two journal articles in the pipeline -, and the November 2014 issue of the newsletter of the European Evaluation Society (EES) includes a short article that accompanies our award-winning poster. You download the newsletter via this link. It'll take you to the EES website.

More reading on QCA and decision tree analysis

For those interested in our conversation with Rick Davies comparing the virtues of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and decision tree analysis respectively, there is a new instalment on Rick's blog Rick On the Road. Renewed thanks to Rick and to everyone who have shown their interest in Qualitative Comparative Analysis!

Qualifying Rick Davies's findings from 'triangulating QCA'

We are delighted to see that there is interest in the resources we have posted on this blog (more than 5,000 page views as of today). Most recently, Rick Davies has used our dataset for a presentation at the 11th biennial EES conference (see earlier posts below) which compares decision tree analysis with Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). Rick comes to the conclusions that (1) a decision tree analysis of our data would have yielded fewer paths to evaluation effectiveness, and that (2) those paths would have operated a more precise differentiation between cases of effective and ineffective evaluation respectively. Rick's presentation is available on YouTube. We have found it stimulating to examine the merits of decision tree analysis (and other methods) as compared to QCA. 

Meanwhile, we believe that Rick’s conclusions are flawed, for the following reasons

The poster - again

Apparently some organisations' servers make it difficult to download documents from dropbox, which is where many of the links on this site will take you. Please send in a comment if you experience any such problems and we'll send the file by e-mail. Meanwhile, here is our poster in its .jpg incarnation - a bit difficult to read on this page, I am afraid.

The link to our award-winning poster

As promised in the previous post, this is the LINK to our poster presenting the findings of our Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). For those who are interested in innovative ways of visualising QCA findings, the diagram in the middle of the poster (diagram reproduced below) may be particularly interesting. A 2-pager presenting the findings can be downloaded here; links the full review report are available in the 'welcome' section on the right side of this blog.

Paths to effective evaluation in the field of VAWG - Diagram from the Raab/Stuppert poster

Our poster at the EES Conference

The poster presenting the results of our review has won the Best Poster Award at the 11th biennial conference of the European Evaluation Society (EES) in Dublin. If you happen to be around, come and have a look at it - find it in poster area 06 in Liffey A on the 1st floor (where the coffee and lunch breaks happen). 

We are delighted about this enthusiastic acknowledgement of our efforts to present the results of a QCA truth table in an accessible form.

EES Conference - pick up a leaflet

If you are at the 11th EES Conference these days, please have a look at our poster (poster area Liffey A, 1st floor) summarising our review findings, and pick up one of the leaflets we have placed near the poster. In case no leaflets are left - you can also download a copy using the link in the previous blog post.

And you are warmly invited to join us in Zoe Stephenson's panel session on Thurday 2 October at 9h45 in Wicklow (2nd floor), meeting room 2b.

Presentations at the EES Conference

For your diaries in early October:
The findings of our review will be presented at the 11th Biennial Conference of the European Evaluation Society (EES) at two occasions:

Presenting and discussing our findings

On 1 July 2014, we – Michaela Raab and Wolfgang Stuppert – presented the findings of our review at the DFID office in Whitehall (London). Some 30 participants from DFID and external organisations – representing chiefly NGOs and consulting firms working on violence against women and girls - attended the 2-hour event, including DFID staff outside Whitehall (who joined us via videoconference). After our presentation (slides available via this link), Sam Coope from DFID in Zimbabwe and Asmita Naik, an independent consultant, reported about their experience in VAWG-related evaluation.

The discussion that followed drew from the participants’ rich and diverse programming and research experience. We would like to flag a few points

Dataset available now!

At the early stages of our review we promised we would share the QCA dataset. We – Michaela Raab and Wolfgang Stuppert – hold the intellectual property rights to the information we have generated. Our DFID counterparts would like the data to be freely accessible for people wanting to explore it, replicate our analysis or do further analysis – and so do we.

Full Review report on-line!

Our full Review report is now available on-line, on the DFID Research for Development (R4D) site. This link will take you there; you can download the report for free. The actual report encompasses 30 pages with plenty of tables in-between, but the annexes are huge as we have appended all our data collection instruments and plenty of extra information.

For very rushed readers, a 2-page document summarising practical recommendations will be added at a later point. (Meanwhile feel free to study the short executive summary, which is part of the report.)

We would be delighted to have your comments, here or via the e-mail address you'll find in the report.

Presentation of our findings and recommendations

On Tuesday 1 July, the two of us - Michaela Raab and Wolf Stuppert - presented our review findings and recommendations at the DFID office in Whitehall, London. Many thanks to everyone who attended and who contributed useful questions and insights. Within the next couple of weeks, we will summarise a few points that we have found particularly interesting in the discussion, and share them here.

Q&A on definitions

Some snag in our 'comments' function makes that comments are only shown if readers click on the titles of our posts. A couple of weeks ago, Rick Davies asked a few questions about our definitions:

Definitions for QCA

As announced earlier, we are now in a position to share the definitions we have used in our Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). You can download the definitions as a PDF document by clicking here. 

Thoughtful comments

Our inception report has received a thoughtful review by Rick Davies on his blog Rick on the Road. Titled "The Challenges of Using QCA", the posting summarises some of the methodological difficulties we have encountered so far.