DATA COLLECTION & SOURCING
Keeping Data Inclusivity Without Diluting your Results
Let’s say you are surveying 100 people out of 10,000. You want to analyse the data from your sample of 100 to get answers about the likely behaviours and preferences of the overall 10,000 person population. Part of your project focuses on equity among sexual...
Why Big Data Needs Small Data
We now have unparalleled access to enormous amounts of data, automatically generated and gathered, which represent sample sizes that are nearly impossible to replicate with traditional survey methods. People excitedly tell us that many major equity issues,...
Representation and Visibility in Quantitative Surveys
What is the role of quantitative surveys in shedding light on different lived realities? Which choices made during the design of an impact evaluation affect who is represented and listened to? Data collections can make structural inequalities invisible and...
Who is the Head of Your Household?
Who is the head of your household? It probably depends on who you ask. In my household, you will either find out that I am the head of the household, my husband is the head of the household, or that my bulldog is the head of my household. It depends on how you...
What is Data Worth to You?
Data Collection Ethics in the Information Economy
How I Became a Person of Colour
This week, we’re welcoming guest author Laura Sundstrom of Vantage Evaluation, who is sharing her experience at the Equitable Evaluation Design Lab.
Why We Need to be Data Detectives
In last week’s email newsletter I mentioned Naomi Wolf’s data problems (That’s Naomi Wolf - not Naomi Klein as I accidentally wrote in part of the text. Apologies to Naomi Klein fans!) In Wolf’s latest book she makes claims about the number of men executed in England...
Is the “Interviewer Effect” Skewing Your Survey Results?
Did you know that who collects your data can also affect it? It’s called the interviewer effect, and it’s crucial to consider it when using social surveys.
Fresh Apples to Old Oranges: A case study in why data biographies aren’t only useful, they’re ethical.
It’s not ethical to rank countries without giving us details on the data. It’s not equitable to rank countries on data from wildly different years. Where is the data biography for the new OECD Social Institutions and Gender Index? I do a lot of work in the area of...
An Introduction to the Data Biography
Building a data biography, a comprehensive background of the conception, birth and life of any dataset is an essential step along the path to equity in data science. This includes all data: data that you collected, data that comes from large trusted sources, data that comes from open data libraries, data that comes from peer-reviewed research. All data.