Tuesday 7 October 2014

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!

Monday 6 October 2014

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


Friday 3 October 2014

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.

Wednesday 1 October 2014

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.