CECAN Workshop - What Good Data could do for Evaluation

25th February 2019, 12:30 - 16:00

Augusta Ada Room, The Alan Turing Institute, British Library, 96 Euston Road, London, NW1 2DB

You are warmly invited to join us for this workshop jointly hosted by the Alan Turing Institute and CECAN, the Centre for Evaluating Complexity Across the Nexus.

Workshop Overview:

The rise of data science has opened up a number of opportunities for government policy planning and complex evaluation. Although both data science and evaluation involve using data to better understand a particular issue, the benefit of using data science for policy evaluation has still to be established. After all, as Rogers et al. (2015) sum up:

"The choice of methods and designs for impact evaluation of policies and programmes in industry, innovation and science is not straightforward, and comes with a unique set of challenges. Policies and programmes may depend on contributions from other agencies and other actors, or take many years to emerge. Measuring direct cause and effect can be difficult.

There is not one right way to conduct an impact evaluation. What is needed is a combination of methods and designs that suit the particular situation. When choosing these methods and designs, three issues need to be taken into account: the available resources and constraints; the nature of what is being evaluated; and the intended use of the evaluation." (Rogers et. al., 2015, p.6)

In what ways might future evaluation benefit from data science? Perhaps the nature of policy evaluation requires a new kind of data science, specifically shaped for complex evaluations? In what ways might complex policy evaluation challenge current ideas of what data science is and it can do? How might data science be used or adapted specifically for evaluating complex government policy?

This workshop brings together policy practitioners, evaluators and researchers interested in exploring the applicability of data science and new methodological approaches for policy evaluation.

Schedule:

12:30 - 13:30 Registration with Lunch

13:30 Welcome

13:35 ATI Welcome

13:45 Complexity Science – Q&A

14:15 Data Science – Q&A

14:45 Break

15:15 Evaluation -– Q&A

15:45 Summary and conclusions

15:55 Next steps

16:00 Ends

Please note, this workshop is a free but places are limited, so registration is required.