Social Assessments and Program Evaluation with Limited Formal Data : Thinking Quantitatively, Acting Qualitatively
This note revisits the long-standing tension between qualitative and quantitative approaches to poverty analysis, with reference to social assessments and program evaluation. It presents a summary of recent work in St. Lucia and Colombia, where inn...
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| Format: | Brief |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Washington, DC
2012
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2001/07/2819774/social-assessments-program-evaluation-limited-formal-data-thinking-quantitatively-acting-qualitatively http://hdl.handle.net/10986/11376 |
| Summary: | This note revisits the long-standing
tension between qualitative and quantitative approaches to
poverty analysis, with reference to social assessments and
program evaluation. It presents a summary of recent work in
St. Lucia and Colombia, where innovative efforts were made
to integrate the guiding principles of quantitative
approaches with the practice of qualitative approaches.
While neither case should be seen as ideal or a substitute
for a more comprehensive analysis, they nonetheless present
a series of strategies for generating some meaningful and
useful results in environments where, for any number of
reasons, formal data is weak or absent. Such environments,
of course, are all too common in low-income countries. The
first case, a social assessment of poverty, comes from St.
Lucia. The task manager had funds sufficient to cover key
informant and focus group interviews in sixteen communities
around the island. Given this small number, he elected not
to work with a "random sample" as such but rather
to maximize coverage on as many key variables as possible
(rural/urban, access to clean water, distance to main road,
level of poverty, etc). Our St Lucia-based colleagues
happened to have access to a 1990 census, but it did not
contain data on the full set of variables that would have
enabled us to generate a final sample meeting all our criteria. |
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