Theories of change and logic models

Content for Thursday, January 26, 2023

Readings

• Chapter 2 in Impact Evaluation in Practice (Gertler et al. 2016)
• Chapter 2 in Evaluation: A Systematic Approach (Rossi, Lipsey, and Henry 2019). This is available on iCollege.
• Chapter 3 in Evaluation: A Systematic Approach (Rossi, Lipsey, and Henry 2019). This is available on iCollege.

Slides

The slides for today’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.

View all slides in new window Download PDF of all slides

Introduction

Reproducibility

Program theories

Logic models & results chains

Tip

Fun fact: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.

Videos

Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.

• Introduction
• Reproducibility
• Program theories
• Logic models & results chains

You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:

In-class stuff

Here are all the materials we’ll use in class:

• Session 3 FAQ slides (PDF)
• Errors vs. warnings vs. messages (i.e. what to do when R shows you red text)
• R Markdown examples:
  • Quarto!
  • Example R Markdown file used as a code-through or step-by-step teaching document:
    • Lots of blog posts here
    • Julia Silge, “Modeling human/computer interactions on Star Trek from #TidyTuesday with workflowsets”
    • Bob Rudis, “Some Covid Donuts To End The Week”
    • Holger K. von Jouanne-Diedrich, “The “Youth Bulge” of Afghanistan: The Hidden Force behind Political Instability”
  • Example R Markdown file used as a publicly-consumable document:
    • Click on the “Manuscript” menu item at this site
    • See the Rmd file here

Hands-on R materials:

• Introduction to the tidyverse Posit.cloud project

• Introduction to the tidyverse project .zip file

• Regression playground Posit.cloud project

• Regression playground project .zip file

• Lab slides 1: Markdown and universal writing (PDF)

• Lab slides 2: Getting started with R and RStudio (PDF)

• Lab slides 3: Data basics (PDF)

• Lab slides 4: Visualize data with ggplot2 (PDF)

• Lab slides 5: Transform data with dplyr (PDF)

Logic model for MPA/MPP program

References

Gertler, Paul J., Sebastian Martinez, Patrick Premand, Laura B. Rawlings, and Christel M. J. Vermeersch. 2016. Impact Evaluation in Practice. 2nd ed. Inter-American Development Bank; World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/25030.

Rossi, Peter H., Mark W. Lipsey, and Gary T. Henry. 2019. Evaluation: A Systematic Approach. 8th ed. Los Angeles: Sage.