Tuesday 27th April 2021, 13:00 – 14:00 BST
Presenters: Barbara Befani & Corinna Elsenbroich (CECAN)
Webinar Overview:
In this webinar, Barbara and Corinna will present their recent paper in Evaluation on ‘Diagnostic Evaluation with Simulated Probabilities’. As policy makers require more rigorous assessments for the strength of evidence in Theory-Based evaluations, Bayesian logic is attracting increasing interest; however, the estimation of probabilities that this logic (almost) inevitably requires presents challenges. Probabilities can be estimated on the basis of empirical frequencies, but such data is often unavailable for most mechanisms that are objects of evaluation. Subjective probability elicitation techniques are well established in other fields and potentially applicable, but they present potential challenges and might not always be feasible. We introduce the community to a third way: simulated probabilities. We provide proof of concept that simulation can be used to estimate probabilities in diagnostic evaluation and illustrate our case with an application to health policy.
The Evaluation paper is open access and can be found here.
Presenter Biographies:
Dr Barbara Befani, CECAN Research Fellow, has been developing evaluation methods for 15 years. Her interests include 1) evaluation quality; 2) methodological appropriateness and comparative advantages and weaknesses of different evaluation methods; 3) causal inference frameworks for impact evaluation; and 4) specific hybrid, quali-quanti methodologies, like Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and Process Tracing (in particular its Bayesian formalisation, which she is extending to all forms of Theory-Based Evaluation).
Dr Corinna Elsenbroich, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology (University of Surrey) and part of the CECAN team. Her research interests are in complexity social science, in particular methods to tackle complex causality. She has been teaching Evaluation Research and courses on Agent-based Modelling Process Tracing and Qualitative Comparative Analysis.
How to Join:
This talk will take place via a Zoom Webinar (registration now closed).
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. In case you are unable to attend, a recording of the webinar will be uploaded to our website following the event.
Link to Webinar Recording:
If you were unable to join the webinar, you can watch the session via our YouTube channel below. We are also pleased to be able to share a PDF version of the PowerPoint slides, please click here to view.