Don’t let the magician distract you with tricks: designing evaluations to inform action in new settings

Abstract

Interventions differ from one another and contexts vary and change. So, what can we learn from the evaluation of complicated interventions? In this talk, Calum Davey at the Centre for Evaluation at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) will share the results of a wide-ranging interdisciplinary review on how to learn more from evaluations. The review covered a range of methods for learning more, and particularly focused on the distinction between context-centred and intervention-centred ideas about where causal effects ‘are’, and the role of evaluations in learning about the processes that give rise to causal effects.

About author

Calum has worked at LSHTM since 2011, first in the Faculty of Epidemiology and Population Health, then in the Faculty of Public Health and Policy, now with the International Centre for Evidence on Disability. He has mostly worked on evaluations of complex interventions with various levels of behavioural components. He spent a year on secondment at the Education Endowment Foundation where he helped with the design of trials of interventions to improve academic attainment for children from less-well-off backgrounds in the UK. He is one of the deputy directors of the Centre for Evaluation and authored a pre-inception and inception papers for the Centre for Evidence for Development Impact and Learning.

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