Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Organizational Development

Most people had not paid too much attention to AI until recently. While the simulation of human intelligence in automating boring household work is still low in our lives (to my greatest regret), AI appeared in different professions overnight and started to replace knowledge-intensive activities such as targeting online advertisements,...

Machine Learning (ML) in Program Evaluation

Big data and consequently Artificial Intelligence (AI) are everywhere nowadays, even in impact evaluation. This blog post is inspired by an EES webinar held by Tom Zimmermann and Marcel Tkacik and intends to provide some basic understanding of how AI, or more precisely ML can be applied when it is...

How to code qualitative data? (PART2)

The first part of this series was about the logic of grounded theory coding, where the point was to emerge new theories out of qualitative data. It required a fully open approach and a flexible coding strategy.  Although 'grounded theory' is an excellent, well-structured, and precisely defined qualitative approach to...

How to code qualitative data? (PART1)

Anyone, who ever worked with qualitative data, knows how messy it can be without a rigorous methodological strategy. No matter whether it is about focus group transcripts, observational notes, open-ended survey questions, or other text documents, as the quantity increases, that efficient analysis becomes a challenge. It is pointless to...

10 tips on How to Design a Participative Research Process

Participative research (PR) is a research style, or as Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury described it, "an orientation to inquiry" (2008, p.1) applied to make a positive social or organizational impact by involving the object of the research in the process.  PR is a bottom-up approach that aligns the power...

Book of January- Discretionary time: A new measure of freedom

Goodin, R. E., Rice, J. M., Parpo, A., & Eriksson, L. (2008). Discretionary time: A new measure of freedom Working on a publication, nowadays I read a lot about the problem of valuing unpaid household labor, and how it can become more visible on the level of the individual or...

How to design an excellent survey questionnaire?

Dear Reader! I wish you a Happy New Year full of energy, passion, inspiration, and curiosity! We are driving forward in 2022 with a strong set of research and evaluation capabilities to help clients fast track delivery of organizational learning, monitoring, and capacity development. This year, we have a strong...

The art of facilitation

Next week I will participate in an exciting project, which I am personally committed to. There will be an international conference in Budapest that will function as the public discourse of the European Union’s ambitious new strategy to boost renovation, called "A Renovation Wave for Europe – Greening our buildings,...

Challenges and benefits of using participatory research methods in evaluation

Not so long ago I finished a research project that incorporated a participatory approach. This ranged from designing the evaluation over the data collection phase to reporting the study. This means, that we applied the fundamental principle of involvement and empowerment of people being researched. In this post, I will...