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Recent Posts
- Evaluation of marketing – grappling with the important but hard to measure outcomes
- The Friday Funny: A surrealistic mega-analysis of redisorganization theories
- Getting the facts straight on youth unemployment rates
- The Friday Funny: Negotiating the budget
- The Friday Funny: Evaluation and content expertise
Recent Comments
- Michael Scriven on Evaluation of marketing – grappling with the important but hard to measure outcomes
- Kathleen Lynch on The Friday Funny: Negotiating the budget
- Heather Nunns on Friday Funny – 10 ways of knowing you’ve been an evaluator too long
- Tarina MacDonald on 9 golden rules for commissioning a waste-of-money evaluation
- Tarina MacDonald on Valuing cultural expertise – in $$ terms
Archives
Tag Archives: reporting
Facebook ‘spreads syphilis’ – or does it?
Another example of how misreporting of findings can undermine effective public response to identified hazards.
Posted in Appropriate inference, Appropriate reporting, Causal inference, Health
Tagged causality, reporting
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Languaging in evaluation – raising fewer hackles vs. clarity of message
Languaging (finding ways for difficult or complex ideas to make sense in different contexts) is a very important issue for getting people to buy into (and take action based on) evaluation findings, particularly when some aspect of a program is not doing well. Positive languaging can be highly effective for getting stakeholders to buy into not-so-positive findings. However, we do need to be wary of defaulting to positive, ‘comfort zone’ language all the time…. Continue reading
Posted in Education, Learning from failure
Tagged evaluative interpretation, failure, languaging, reporting, Utilization focus
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‘Fast failure’ and Work-Out: Organizational cultures that support learning from failure
Learning from failure has received very little attention in evaluation, but the management literature has been discussing it since the 1990s. The real challenge is building an organizational culture where not only is experimentation encouraged, but it is not necessarily a career-limiting move to produce failures, mistakes, and negative results. Organizational leaders have a huge part to play in setting the tone and showing through their actions that learning from failure is important. And for government agencies in particular, the media has an important part to play in supporting rather than undermining genuine evaluation. Continue reading
500 cockroaches on a bus – or are there?
A recent expose of dodgy statistics in the UK about pests on public transport shows just how hard it can be to, firstly, get to the truth about unreliable or fabricated statistics that are uncritically reported, and, secondly, how hard it can be to get corrections made. Continue reading
What you measure and how you measure it – the Greek financial example
A salutary reminder that just because things are measured precisely (such as money) doesn’t mean that the measurements are valid or useful. As reported by Louise Story, Landon Thomas Jr and Nelson D. Schwartz, in the New York Times on … Continue reading
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Patricia at CIRCLE (RMIT)