For those of you conducting life skills activities or life skills training with young people or adult facilitators. Here is number 12 of 15 weekly posts on Monitoring and Evaluating Life Skills. Each of them are extracted from the Toolkit I developed for the Jacobs Foundation with the help of many of their field partners and which you can download for FREE by clicking here. Please find the Lifeskills Toolkit half way down the page under the heading, Intervention and Application. If you wish to have a hard (printed) copy please contact me with a short description of your work and why you would like the hard copy. As always please comment on these posts and let's get a conversation going!
The toolkit sets out 12 steps for planning and implementing your project evaluation. In practice, the steps may not always flow from one to another. There will be some movement backwards and forwards and there may be a need to add to, take away from or change the order of steps. Each evaluation works differently as each evaluation and each project has its own unique purpose. The crucial thing is to plan evaluations which are useful, enjoyable and realistic given the amount of time and resources for the project and the expertise of those involved. Where it is helpful, an example is set out in shaded boxes below the general points for each step. Here is more on step 10. This is a long section in the toolkit and this extract is just the outline of what you can find in the full version.
Step TEN: ANALYSE
Now that the information has been assembled, cleaned and organized, it is now DATA. The penultimate step in planning your evaluation is to consider how you will ANALYSE the data. You need to remind yourselves of the purpose of the evaluation. There is nearly always more data generated in the monitoring and evaluation activities than you need. So be clear on what you do need and stick to this! If possible, give yourself the scope to look for the unexpected too.
The same data can be analysed in many different ways and at different levels of complexity. How you do it is linked to the time you have available and the purpose of the evaluation. Remember if you have good data which is well organised you can go back to it and analyse it more deeply and for different purposes later when you have more time!
Here are some simple steps to use to undertake data analysis. There are many ways to do it and so this is not THE way but it is A way to bring together and understand and explain data. If your project or organisation already has set out a way to do this then use the methods that are familiar.
Remind yourself of the aims of the evaluation and the objectives of the specific activity that generated the data you will analyse
- Get familiar with the data to begin the process of abstraction and conceptualisation.
- Create some kind of chart (sometimes called a thematic framework) that sets out the issues arising from the themes you have noted and the sub themes.
- Using the themes and sub themes to guide you, look again at the details of the data. Undertake data analysis activities. Select the activities that are relevant to the type of data you have. Start with what feels simple and build from there. For example: Make a note of the frequency of the data (how often a piece of information occurs or is said). You can colour code the notes or make a coloured dot beside each piece of data to show where the data came from (if you have different sources). This part of the process is sometimes called indexing.
- The next step and the one which is the most difficult to describe is where you interpret the data. This process is about looking for patterns, connections, links and explanations. You search for a structure to explain what you have found. It is not mechanical step it requires your intuition and imagination. You will be illuminating young people’s attitudes, experiences and behaviour. You seek to address the questions that began the evaluation process.
- The final step to analysis is to formulate what you have found out as conclusions and set out specific strategies for change, improvements or simply a scaling up of something that you find is working well! These strategies will often be expressed in an evaluation report as, ‘recommendations’. Also, there may be one-off pieces of information or quotes that are powerful but that do not fit into a pattern. Include these in a summary but resist making a general point from this type of information.
For much more on this section and for a worked through example download the full version of the toolkit.
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