As I sat in a dissertation defense today of one of my evaluation students the conversation turned towards how we as evaluators/assessment professionals assist our clients with becoming informed consumers. As we talked about strategies for this and the usefulness I thought more and more about Empowerment Evaluation (see all the great work by Fetterman) and how I when I wear my statistician hat (I seem to have many hats) how important it is for me to help my clients with their understanding of the methodology that I've used to analyze their data.
As conversations after the defense (he passed by the way...woohoo Dr. Barlow!) came back to this topic many of us on the committee talked about the number of unfortunate times that we knew of/experienced when a "statistician" assisted a client/student with their analyses and failed to fully explain what, how, or why they conducted those analyses and more importantly what it all meant. As an evaluator I always try to empower my clients to know more about the evaluation process and how it can benefit their organization. As a statistician we need to do the same thing. Maybe when I'm in this role I should call myself an "Empowerment Statistician" because my goals are the same when I'm in this role as well.....to educate and increase my client's capacity to understand the statistical analyses used to explore their data and lead to their utilization of those statistical results. I want my clients to not only understand it when I report the statistical significance of the analyses that I perform but also how they can use these results to inform practice and enhance their organization. As a statistics teacher I also need to encourage my students to do this as well as it is not enough to just conduct the analyses and report the significance/non-significance of findings but to also empower our clients to learn how they too can develop meaningful questions, select appropriate data collection instruments, collect relevant data, and analyze that data in a way that is meaningful to their organization.
So...now to come up with strategies to empower my clients in this regard and to also train my students to become empowerment statisticians. :)
1 comment:
Great approach! I think great statistical literacy is paramount. It is challenging when leaders may believe their cup of tea is full. I worked at a large nonprofit that had access to wonderful third party evaluations. They would receive reports with statistical significance tests and effect size results. The problem was when the CEO stated "A difference of 3% does not seem statistically significant to me."
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