To attribute or not to attribute – Jon Stewart vs Dick Cheney

In a recent episode of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show he deconstructs a high-profile interview with Dick Cheney, the previous Vice President of the United States, undertaken by another interviewer. While this is a comedy show, being an overly analytical sort of person, I can’t watch it without analyzing what is going on it in from the point of view of outcomes theory! At a technical level, the key issue Stewart is focusing on in creating his laughs is what in outcomes theory is called – demonstrable attribution. Demonstrable attribution is being able to demonstrate that an improvement which occurs following an intervention has been caused by a particular intervention (see here for more outcomes theory information on this). In summary, Stewart claims that Dick Cheney is applying a double standard around demonstrable attribution.

More on politicians – accountability (praise and blame) and having 'blown it'

Further to my last posting on whether or not the jump in President Bush’s approval rating was attributable to him (i.e. provable that he caused most of it, rather than it just being the fact that he happened to find himself being President on September 11th), I came across a letter to Newsweek which relates to another aspect of the features of steps and outcomes in outcomes models as related to politicians. (The letter is the second letter listed here). This time it is the issue of accountability.

Impact evaluation's day in the sun (Part III)

[Please Read Part I and Part II first]. Now that I have got to Part III of this posting on the impact evaluation debate, the time has come for me to front up and tell you how I think things should be done if I were in charge of the world. First, the concept of there being a shoot-out between impact evaluation and other types of evaluation is about as sensible as trying to have a debate as to whether a fork or a knife is the better kitchen utensil. It obviously depends on what you want to do with it. This does not, of course mean that it might not be reasonable to argue that there are not enough knives in the kitchen at a particular point in time and that we should go out and encourage knife collecting rather than just getting more and more forks. 

Impact evaluation's day in the sun (Part I)

When you’ve been around for a while you see things come and go. Impact evaluation – evaluation looking at the longer-term (or ‘higher-level’ outcomes within an visual outcomes model) is currently enjoying a resurgence (sometimes its just called plain outcome evaluation). I’ve been attending a number of international evaluation conferences recently and had the pleasure of going to several workshops from experts on impact evaluation – Gary Henry from the University of North Carolina who ran a workshop at the United Kingdom Evaluation conference in Bristol and Charles Reichardt from the University of Denver ran a workshop on estimating the effects of interventions at the American Evaluation Conference in Denver.  I thought both were excellent and showed the level of sophistication some of the experts thinking about impact/outcome evaluation are going to to do the job properly. I will blog in more detail about what they were saying a little later. However, these presentations were little oases of calm in a wider and more heated debate in evaluation circles about the resurgence of impact evaluation.