Monday 31 March 2014

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.

Wednesday 26 March 2014

Inception report ready for sharing

The inception report, which summarises our review methodology, is finally ready for wider dissemination. You can download it by clicking on THIS LINK. It is a large file of some 1.9MB. 

Due to some technical complication that we do not want to explore in detail, some text magically disappears when you try to read the report in your browser. (For instance, in Firefox our response to the points raised by SEQUAS disappear.) So: if you wish to read the report, do not try to read it in your browser - rather click on "download" and use Adobe Reader to make sure you get the full text.

The annexes to the report include the tools we have used so far (coding instructions, survey questions and interview guides), as well as documentation on our initial dialogue with the External Reference Group, and with the Specialised Evaluation and Quality Assurance Service (SEQUAS). We will post more updates in the coming weeks.

Final report planned for June 2014!

We have received a few queries as to when our final report will be available. The plan is to complete it by/ in June 2014. It will include our findings from Qualitative Comparative Analysis and Process Tracing, as well as short descriptions of 15-20 evaluation approaches and designs that we have found effective or promising. 
Furthermore, we will produce a couple of papers:
  • A paper summarising our findings for development and evaluation practitioners.
  • A more academic, peer-reviewed article that will explain our review methodology, in particular the use of QCA in this study. Peer review means that it'll probably take until 2015 or even 2016 until the article is published.
  • We will also post summaries of our findings and of key steps in our research on this blog. It has been a bit quiet in recent weeks because we wanted to complete our dialogue with the external reference group that accompanies the review before sharing the details we explain in our Inception Report (see post above).
We are still looking for suitable international events in late May or in June to present our findings. If any interesting events come to your mind, please let us know!