The Power Dynamics of Data Jargon
Early in my career, I was working on a project using education data, and we were having a meeting with policymakers, school principals, and a team of researchers. When one of the principals asked a question about what assumptions were used in crafting one of the...
Learning to Love Uncertainty (Why We Need to Stop Using “Not Statistically Significant”)
I want to talk to you about why you should stop saying "not statistically significant" based on sample size alone.The term "not statistically significant" should only be applied to a hypothesis, not a sample size, and even then it's an arbitrary line we've drawn to...
Learning from Indigenous Ways of Knowing
Learning #1: Indigenous Quantitative Methods A few months ago I set out to create a research brief of Indigenous Quantitative Methodologies. I wanted to start a survey of just some of the existing ways that Indigenous cultures around the world create knowledge and...
Research Brief: Paying Respondents for Data
Does Paying or Compensating Survey Respondents Negatively Affect Response Quality or Reliability?At We All Count, we think a lot about how to increase the equity of the data gathering process. We make a living off of the data science ecosystem and so do many of our...
Thoughts from Talking Data Equity: RFPs
At our recent Talking Data Equity session, 150+ people turned up to discuss one of the most important (and frustrating) parts of the data ecosystem in the mission-driven sector: Requests for Proposals (RFPs). If you haven’t been through such a process, it's...
How to Talk to Your Boss About Data Equity
Talking about data equity can be tricky. Maybe you've been to a conference or a workshop where you encountered an idea, a tool or a process that you're super excited about. You want to bring it up with your team on Monday but by then you're a little hazy on the...
Getting Past Identity to What You Really Want
Too often in data science, we use identity categories. We once were hired by clients involved in a youth mental health situation where they needed to target scarce resources (why the resources were scarce is an entirely other conversation for a different...
The Methodology Matrix: How To not get Bullied, Blindsided or Bored when Designing Your Data Project
You’ve heard us say it before: Define your question first, then choose a methodology. Rather than letting your methodology limit your questions, let your research questions drive the project design. For an example of how to reframe research questions and adjust...
What To Do When You Can’t Pick The Data
BACKGROUND: We All Count asked you, our project members, for your experiences - both positive and negative - with situations where you can't pick the data that you're asked to work with. We heard about difficulties with poorly designed collection questions;...
No One Is an Asterisk
“We are a small population of people because of genocide. No other reason. If you eliminate us in the data, we don’t exist. We don’t exist for the allocation of resources”. - Abigail Echo-Hawk, Pawnee, Director of the Urban Indian Health Institute and Chief Research...