I’ve had to— as they say in scoring large scale writing assessments— “recalibrate.” I’ve recalibrated my attitude toward IRBs and their need when it comes to evaluating interventions designed to better communities. I attended a session today at Light Hall on “IRB issues in community-engaged research” and sponsored by the Vanderbilt IRB. I had no [...]
Survey & Questionnaires —
Category Archives: Survey & Questionnaires
Commercial use of Cognitive Edge methodology
Yesterday I got a tweet from David Snowden with two links on a new implementation of the SenseMaker software and related methodology of narrative collection. The Brook Besor Consultants have been gearing ourselves up for using both in our evaluation work on the NIH grant to Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach.
The software was designed originally [...]
Been re-reading Ramalingam, et al’s Exploring the science of complexity…
to identify some measures and descriptive information we could use and gather for an evaluation project. Measurement methods such as sociograms— to see who is connected to who, particularly in terms of feedback and feedback processes; social network analysis (SNA)— to look at possible emergent properties of the networks; questions to use in structured [...]
Here are some biases I am aware that I fall prey to …
Information bias and Planning fallacy. Big time for the latter. I know evaluators and researcher often succumb to Confirmation bias, Déformation professionnelle, and Experimenter’s or Expectation bias. We, evaluators, often interview and survey others as to why they chose or did certain things. They may select among the options given, when, in reality, their decisions [...]
Decision-making & behavioral biases: How are you affected?
Here’s the list from Wikipedia. It has grown since I studied them years ago in speech com at West Virginia University. I more or less specialized in what was called then, “receiver” biases. If we do have four “systems” operating in our brain and, as Kahneman suggests, we lean toward the intuitive first in making [...]
Don’t we need additional models for assessing whether something worked?
You may wonder what manure and rat dung have to do with statistical assessment of program and intervention effects. Read on…
Tuesday I attended the newly formed Tennessee Prevention Advisory Council (TN PAC) to the Division of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services (DADAS), Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities. It is an honor to be [...]
High school homerooms ain’t what they used to be
I could begin this with the line: “A funny thing happened on the way to drawing a random sample of high school students.” But I don’t have a follow up. So let me just say that homerooms in high schools ain’t like they used to be.
As I’ve mentioned before, I am working in a trio [...]
Surveying homeless & runaway students
Last semester I had been asked to help facilitate a survey of homeless students in high schools. I dithered around and have just recently turned my full attention to it. I was reluctant because I did not sense the person asking to do the survey had a handle on either the cost in time spent [...]