Instructor: Ann Doucette, PhD Successful evaluation depends on our ability to generate evidence attesting to the feasibility, relevance/effectiveness of the interventions, services, or products we study. While theory guides our designs and how we organize our work, it is measurement that provides the evidence we use in making judgments about the quality of what we evaluate. Measurement, whether it results from self-report survey, interview/focus groups, observation, document review, or administrative data must be systematic, replicable, interpretable, reliable, and valid. The quality of the inferences made in evaluation studies is directly related to the quality of the measurement on which we base our judgments. Judgments attesting to the ineffective interventions may be flawed – the reflection of measures that are imprecise and not sensitive to the characteristics we chose to evaluate. Evaluation attempts to compensate for imprecise measurement with increasingly sophisticated statistical procedures to manipulate data. The emphasis on statistical analysis all too often obscures the important characteristics of the measures we choose. This course will cover: - Assessing measurement precision: Examining the precision of measures in relationship to the degree of accuracy that is needed for what is being evaluated. - Quantification: Do response options/coding categories segment the respondent sample in meaningful and useful ways? - Issues and considerations for using existing measures versus developing your own measures - Criteria for choosing measures - Balancing measurement precision and error Recommended Audience: This course would be of interest and benefit to anyone using quantitative (e.g., surveys, etc.) or qualitative (interviews, focus groups, etc.) measurement in their evaluations. TEI Certificate: This course fulfills the following requirements: - Evaluation Foundations course for the Certificate in Evaluation Practice (CEP) - Analytic Approaches course for the Certificate in Advanced Evaluation Practices (CAEP) - Quantitative Focus elective for the Certificate in Analytic Evaluation Methods (CAEM)