1,720,957 research outputs found
Formative Evaluation of Eastern Carver County's Intercultural Specialists Program
No full textReport and poster completed in 2016 by a School of Public Health student enrolled in PUBH 7784: Public Health Administration and Policy Master's Project (Zobeida Bonilla, advisor), in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the master of public health degree.This project was completed as part of the 2015-2016 Resilient Communities Project (rcp.umn.edu) partnership with Carver County. The Eastern Carver County School District Community Education Department recently hired intercultural specialists to assist with outreach to new immigrant populations in the county. Project lead and community education director Jackie Johnston collaborated with a master of public health student in the Maternal and Child Health program to conduct a formative evaluation of the intercultural specialist program. The students' final report is available.This project was supported by the Resilient Communities Project (RCP), a program at the University of Minnesota whose mission is to connect communities in Minnesota with U of MN faculty and students to advance local sustainability and resilience through collaborative, course-based projects. RCP is a program of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA). More information at http://www.rcp.umn.edu.Dighe, Satlaj. (2016). Formative Evaluation of Eastern Carver County's Intercultural Specialists Program. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/184932
Exploring Evaluation Capacity Building in Community-Based Health Organizations in India: What Works and Why
No full textUniversity of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. June 2021. Major: Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development. Advisor: David Johnson. 1 computer file (PDF); ix, 185 pages.This research explored evaluation capacity building (ECB) needs and strategies, as well as facilitators and barriers experienced by program staff and independent evaluators working with community-based health organizations (CBHOs) in India. It suggests a significant shift from donor-led to CBHO-led evaluation practice in the community health sector of India. CBHOs, however, have limited access to evaluation training, resources, and macro-level evaluation infrastructure. The overall purpose of the study was to understand how CBHOs in India build their capacity to conduct evaluations and use evaluation results in guiding program planning and improvement. This was explored with the following questions: 1) what are the internal and external contexts driving the need to engage in ECB? 2) what strategies and approaches are viewed by the organizations as most important in bringing about evaluation capacity in Indian CBHOs? and 3) what, according to the leadership of these organizations, enables or obstructs the process of ECB? To answer these questions, the study conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with twenty-three (23) CBHO employees and seven (7) independent evaluators. The interview data were analyzed using constant comparative analysis, which aided in identifying themes across the data. The results of the analysis demonstrate that CBHOs build their evaluation capacity by embedding ECB in program structures, facilitating on-the-job training, and building a support network of evaluation experts to guide their ECB efforts. The study also observed that organizations committed to developing evaluation capacity are intentional about organizational learning and seek to establish peer learning structures and create learning opportunities for their employees. In addition, senior leadership in such organizations demonstrates support of evaluation by facilitating on-the-job capacity building, securing adequate funds for evaluation, and creating a democratic work culture that encourages critical thinking. On the other hand, short project timelines, shifting donor priorities, limited government interest in following evidence-informed policy, and resource constraints hinder the use of evaluation and negatively affect organizations’ interest in ECB. The senior-level program staff indicated a need to build critical thinking capacities at CBHOs to enhance ECB processes. Entry-level staff expressed their interest in learning evaluation skills and methods to implement internal evaluations. The experiences of grassroots health workers suggest limited access to evaluation training, resources, and support structures. The availability of evaluation training seminars, resource persons, and other support material is limited at regional locations and in regional languages, highlighting an urgent need for decentralized and culturally responsive ECB interventions. This research adds to the literature by identifying needs, strategies, and both facilitating and impeding factors for developing evaluation capacity at CBHOs. CBHOs can use this information to design and implement ECB interventions. The study can be helpful for government, institutes of higher education, and international donor and development organizations as they create ECB resources and provide effective support to grassroots ECB initiatives.Dighe, Satlaj. (2021). Exploring Evaluation Capacity Building in Community-Based Health Organizations in India: What Works and Why. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/224532
Evaluation in the Global South: Practices, Problems, and Prospects
No full textIn recent years, evaluation activities have seen an uptick in the Global South; however, the evaluation discourse is largely dominated by discussions and actions around narrower dimensions such as monitoring and auditing, often driven by donor /funder requirements. Many countries are also limited in their capacity to conduct evaluations on their own and are often sites for large experimental and quasi-experimental studies that do not take into account the socio-cultural and political contexts in these settings. Additionally, the emphasis on assessing “impact” leaves program implementers with little information to improve program performance or understand the underlying mechanisms for why their programs work (or not). This paper discusses the gaps and challenges around evaluation in the Global South and presents recommendations for adopting recent evaluation approaches that value the complexity of context specificity of international development sectors. It also recommends intentionality on the part of researchers, policymakers, and practitioners around building local capacity to design and conduct evaluations
Kanosa- Lending an Ear to the Body and Mind Secrets of Rural Women:Thoughts on Health and Modernity
Full text linkThis review article discusses the text Kanosa - Grameen Streechya Sharir ani Manatil Gupitancha, translated as ‘Lending an Ear to the Secrets of Body and Mind of the Rural Woman’ by Dr. Rani Bang. The original text provides detailed information on various life-cycle health experiences of women; illness categories (nosography); health practices; sexualities; diets and local life-worlds of health and bodily experiences based on the in depth discussions with local women. In the context of current trends and prevailing ideologies in the community health sector of India, our critical review highlights the significance of the approach adopted by Dr. Rani Bang in locating health as an integral part of culture.We seek to introduce important discussions in Bang’s text on ethnophysiology, local categories of diseases and their implications on modern community health interventions, as ell as the definitions of the normal, abnormal and pathological as provided by the local community. In light of these discussions, we examine certain characteristics of the modern Indian community health sector such as its inability to work with local epistemologies of health and illness and its philosophical reliance on Cartesian dualism and western notions of personhood. Certain features of community health such as complete separation of fertility and sexuality as well as the exclusively nutritional approach to dietary phenomena are also reviewed with reference to Kanosa and other significant literature. </jats:p
Deconstructing the Imperial Episteme: Decolonizing Knowledge Production in Program Evaluation
Full text linkScholars, practitioners, and activists have all contributed to the discussion of decolonization of evaluation practice in recent years as attention has increasingly focused on the persistent harms of colonization. While these discussions have led to the development of evaluation frameworks rooted in Indigenous and locally-situated understandings, values, and methods, little attention has been paid to the colonial origins of Western-based evaluation practices that continue to pervade the field. This article seeks to contribute to the conversation about decolonization by focusing on the ways in which Western social theory, born of colonizing nations, has been influenced by the processes of colonization. Drawing on scholars and theorists from the Global South, this article highlights specific apparatuses for dismantling imperial ways of thinking and ways of knowing, and proposes a path forward for evaluators who wish to grapple with the deeply imperial epistemological roots of our field of practice
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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