Aggregate Function in SPSS

October 5, 2010

Sometimes you have a dataset that has a value you need to count.  Let’s say you have a file with 7,000 student records.  Each case has a variable called ‘Section’ that contains numerical codes indicating which section a student was registered in.  You need to know the headcount in each section.  You could run a [...]

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Some Books and Blogs of Interest

September 17, 2010

We have a longstanding interest in graphical representations of quantitative (and qualitative ) data and came upon an interesting thread on the American Evaluation Association discussion. One poster to the thread in question is owner of a great blog on the subject that we just had to note. Check out: www.supportanalytics.com/blog As is always the [...]

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Turning Information Into Action

April 26, 2010

We’ve always been very interested in the way evaluation information is presented. In our view, part of the work involved in creating Usable Knowledge is figuring out how to disseminate what we find to the stakeholders who can act on it. We’ve done all kinds of different things in this area, from brochure reports to [...]

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On Logic Models Theories of Change and Evaluation

March 14, 2010

We came upon an interesting post at JVA Consulting’s blog related to an important topic in the nonprofit world- is our work accomplishing something or are we just doing good.  We’ve worked at places where the emphasis was on ‘good works’ rather than good results, so we appreciate how important this is.  The post talked [...]

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Evaluation Quality

March 11, 2010

John Gargani has put together a humorous and very thoughtful guide to assessment of evaluation quality.  Stakeholders he says, view an evaluation as high quality of it supports their program.  They find numerous flaws in the evaluation if, on the other hand,  it comes up with negative findings.  You’ll find it here. We’d like to add a [...]

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Qualitative versus Quantitative Evaluation

January 22, 2010

We were in a meeting yesterday with a client when someone asked about the differences between qualitative and quantitative research.  Randi Blumenthal-Guigui,Program Director at the Osborne Association offered this example.

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Outcomes and Distributions in Program Evaluation

January 21, 2010

Clients, particularly new clients, often come to us with a seemingly simple question. It typically goes something like this: “Do the kids understand and retain what we are trying to teach them?” “Are the resident’s happy with the program?” “Are patients’ viral counts lower?” “Are couples getting along better?” Typically, they want help developing a [...]

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Some Program Evaluation Reading and Listening

January 11, 2010

Two things of note we’ve come across recently: A book called Developing a Learning Culture in Nonprofit Organizations by Stephen Gill and a story by Emily Hanford on the impacts of pre-school recently aired by American Radio Works. We’ll be blogging about these two pieces in the future but wanted to give them each a [...]

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Jott was Nice but Reqall is Nicer

December 23, 2009

A couple of posts ago we introduced Jott. Jott is now owned by Nuance, which gave us Dragon Naturally Speaking, the speech recognition tool. Unfortunately, Jott has significantly increased its price so we’ve turned to Reqall which does much the same thing for less. Both Jott and Reqall are speech-to-text (or regular text-to-text) reminder systems. [...]

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Internal Versus External Evaluation

December 22, 2009

Should your organization outsource evaluation? Again, we favor a blended solution as discussed in our last post. Consider working with a consultant to set up an evaluation system for your organization but perform routine evaluation work on your own. If you decide to conduct a more comprehensive evaluation such as the one described in our [...]

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