Courses:Evaluation techniques and tools
Teaching Staff
Prof. Bart Meuleman (University of Leuven, Belgium)
Objectives
The evaluation of social policies and programmes is often based on quantitative analyses using the kinds of methods that are dealt with in the two parts of the Statistics & Research Methodology course. These methods are especially useful for effect or impact assessment. However, evaluation research is a much broader concept and encompasses also phases like evaluation of the conceptualization and of the implementation of the programme. Moreover, even for effect evaluation standard quantitative analysis techniques are not always suited because the necessary data for statistical analyses are missing or there are only a few cases to be studied. Micro simulations and methods for comparative case studies may then provide the solution. In any case, in-depth analyses of single cases often provide insights that might not have been obtained in standard quantitative analyses.
The objective of this course is to teach students the principles of evaluation research concentrating mainly on 'non-statistical' approaches and to give them first hand experience with one or more small scale real world evaluations.
Contents
- Designing evaluation research
- Evaluating the conceptualization of the programme
- Evaluating the implementation
- Effect evaluation:
- finding/collecting relevant data
- quantitative methods
- 'ideal type' approach
- micro simulations
- comparative case studies