Wednesday 10 May 2017

Evaluation Norms and Standards - now in six languages!

The United Nations Evaluation Group norms and standards for evaluation are now available in all UN languages - Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. 

Read them - spread them - use them! You can find them here.

In recent years I have been involved in large reviews of evaluations in the development sector, studying a couple of hundreds of evaluation reports. Many of the evaluations would have been vastly better if they had complied with, or at least been inspired, by evaluation norms and standards. I don't say that every evaluation must attain the quality of rigorous scientific research - in the opposite, time and resource constraints usually don't permit rigorous research in the context of evaluations, anyway. But you can still try to make it useful. 

At least, evaluators must make sure they respect the rights and safety of people who participate in the evaluation - i.e. ethics. Otherwise, the harm caused by an evaluation might outweigh its benefits.

Tuesday 9 May 2017

A must-read for evalutors, campaigners and everyone: Beware of confirmation bias

Followers of this blog know that bias is a recurring topic on these virtual pages. Evaluators must be aware of bias to produce robust work. After this year's elections and the disturbing success of "alternative facts" and "post-factual" phenomena, the topic's importance has been acknowledged way beyond research circles, entering public debates.

Bias affects everyone's judgment - and that includes ourselves! A good way to deal with bias is to know about it, to seek out opinions that conflict with ours (i.e. mine, yours, everybody's), and to keep thinking.

A February 2017 issue of the New Yorker aptly summarises a few recent books on confirmation and "myside" bias. Find it here and read it - it may change your way of seeing things, and help you understand why others may sometimes seem terribly obtuse.

And if you like the idea of a song about the types of bias that may occasionally cloud your mind, have a look at this earlier post.