The participatory process is underway. Your monitoring and evaluation system is deployed. You’re collecting the first data of your process. It is necessary to analyze these elements. There are two objectives in this phase:
- Ensure that the results obtained are consistent with the objectives set
- Identify unexpected results, surprises.
In this analysis, you will question the reasons for these results and surprises. Then, you will see how and when you need to adapt both your M&E and the participation process itself.
If your M&E objectives aim at investigating what is causing the outcomes and impacts of a process, you are dealing with causality.
Causality is extremely difficult to establish. Most of the time, you will only be able to establish that the process contributed to observed impacts, along with other causes (hence the importance of monitoring the context!). A few questions that may help:
- Are there evidences that links the process plausibly with observed impacts?
- What would have happened without the process (counterfactual)?
- Are there alternative causes which could lead to the same impacts?
Several methods and softwares might be useful to analyze your data
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Quantitative data analysis |
Qualitative data analysis |
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Methods |
Correlation, data mining, statistics |
Content analysis, thematic coding, |
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Softwares |
SPSS, STATA, SAS |
CAQDAS, Atlas.ti, Nvivo, … |
