Category Archives: Uncategorized

I recently crowd-sourced a list of presentation tips from myself and some pretty smart people in both academia and philanthropy, with the goal of providing guidance to masters students as a key ‘transferable skill’ from our time together. The presentations I have in mind aren’t necessarily single-paper (or even empirical results) presentations, so this listContinueContinue reading “Presentation tips”

In a slight departure from my usual content, this post will be about un/expected renovations (in my case, 2/2 bathrooms at once) and dealing with contractors–with some effort to set things up with behavioral and project management insights insights. Some basics beforehand: Take pre-pictures of everything. You don’t need to have questions later about whatContinueContinue reading “Oh, so part of your house is being renovated?”

This is an effort to develop a core set of questions for someone new to impact evaluation to start to learn it from the empirical literature. Specifically, this is for someone with limited exposure to these methods. Working list: What did this paper tell you about the context of the study? What else do youContinueContinue reading “Introducing program eval one paper at a time”

Well, between getting ready to write this post, building on my previous one, Keren Landman of Vox has come out with a fabulous piece that covers some, but not all, of what I had hoped to say. I will reference her post along with what I planned to write! It does set the tone, soContinueContinue reading “Dismissal of bodily experiences and loss of trust (2)”

Why talk about trust? As some of you know, I have been going deep into reading on trust lately, including Ben Ho’s book and the collection of Onora O’Neill’s lectures on the topic. Trust is needed in times of uncertainty and imperfect information–by definition, we don’t need trust in contexts of certainty and perfect information.ContinueContinue reading “Dismissal of bodily experiences and loss of trust (1)”

This is a work-in-progress. You can view it here for now.

Post-it, sketched December 2020 The word “unintended consequences” gets tossed around a lot in development and social sector work–often as a glib euphemism for “bad stuff we didn’t expect” or a “better call qual” moment. However, many “unintended consequences” are indeed anticipate-able, especially with grounding in theory (+theory of change), the literature, and the context.ContinueContinue reading “Unintended consequences (say what you mean)”

I will be speaking more about research ethics in the coming month (and beyond!). In light of this, I am documenting some formative ethical experiences I have had and that, to some extent, still puzzle me. Perhaps befitting someone initially trained in anthropology and grounded theory, these examples stem from individual interactions I had ‘onContinueContinue reading “Ethical research: reflections from three sites”