- “Our working title was all measures suck, and they all suck in their own way” Angela Duckworth as quoted in a NY Times article on efforts in the US to start evaluating schools on socio-emotional skills like grit.
- The New York Times magazine has an interesting piece on what google has learned about why some work groups thrive and others don’t. They point to the importance of psychological safety —a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking”. I thought this was useful both for thinking about collaborative research teams, as well as for the discussion of the challenges and options for measuring group attributes.
- On the Africa Can blog, Dave Evans recaps the Cash vs Training Smackdown
- Chris Blattman on a new paper which questions the Science paper finding that most studies in psychology don’t replicate: basic issues were that in many cases they changed the intervention or sample pool and issues of power; the authors appear to concede in their response that these issues are there, but argue about how important they are. Wired has a good discussion of the work, noting “Two groups of very smart people are looking at the exact same data and coming to wildly different conclusions.”
- From the Next Billion blog, the lean research movement - a push-back against surveys which are too long and too intrusive. The associated working paper contrasts the example of the Give Directly evaluation as “Hundred-question surveys that take hours to complete and enquire about deeply personal matters such as money, hygiene, and family relations show little respect for subjects’ time and well-being. For example, a recent survey of low-income Kenyan households took “up to six hours” to complete and involved the collection of saliva samples to test subjects’ stress hormone levels.“ against a goal of making the research “delightful” for subjects. Nevertheless, I was underwhelmed by their specific suggestions of what to do and there is no distinction between multi-purpose and one-off evaluative surveys – something like the IFLS is very long and has lots of questions on lots of topics which has led to a lot of research that was probably unanticipated at the time of survey design. In contrast, a 15 minute survey may be enough for a simple impact evaluation but preclude use of the data by others to answer other interesting questions.
- Another forthcoming chapter for the Handbook of Field Experiments – Bertrand and Duflo on field experiments on discrimination
- SIEF has a new webinar series, with Dave Evans discussing impact evaluation with guidance for journalists. Dave recommends minutes 23:10 to 32:39 as being of particular interest with 5 key principles for reporting on impact evaluation for journalists.
- Call for Papers: NOVAFRICA conference on Economic Development in Africa, to be held in Portugal in July. Keynote speakers are Stefan Dercon, Ted Miguel, and myself. Also calls for LACEA/LAMES in Colombia; and the deadline has been extended until March 13 for the Annual Bank Conference on Africa, this year focusing on urbanization
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