Research and evaluation

This is one of my special areas of expertise. My skills include:

• designing and reviewing social science research and evaluation projects
• designing and peer reviewing data collection approaches, including questionnaires
• assessing existing administrative data for suitability of use
• pre-data collection, recommending the appropriate data analysis methods
• post-data collection, reviewing the data and conducting data analyses
• writing and peer reviewing research and evaluation reports and journal articles

I strongly recommend a pre-data collection review. The research and evaluation design that you use restricts your available analyses once your data collection is complete.

To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of. R. A. Fisher

Advanced technical skills

This is my second area of special expertise. These skills require data:

• designing and producing tables that are easy to read
• designing and producing graphs that clearly show your main conclusions
• testing the performance of your questionnaire items
  • this should be performed on pilot data
• testing your modelling assumptions for underlying factors

Other services

I offer a range of services that don’t fit neatly into the categories above. These include:

• performing literature reviews
• peer reviewing literature reviews
• peer reviewing research and evaluation reports
• peer reviewing journal articles prior to publication

Software

I use a range of software, mainly open-source:

• R
  • data analysis
  • graphing
• Stata
  • data analysis
• Microsoft Excel
  • graphing (R preferred)
• Winsteps
  • questionnaire item testing
• Microsoft Word
  • report writing
• LaTeX
  • report writing

All code is provided to you, with code comments.