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> Design & Development > Designing Evaluation Processes > Cost benefit
Designing Evaluation Processes
Cost-benefit issues and designing evaluations
To some people, cost benefit
questions parallel the red rag to the bull.
But what can be carried out
for the level of resources you have available is a key issue in the modern
university.
Starting point
What are the outcomes you
want to achieve from doing an evaluation of your program?
You must define this before
you can have a clear picture of the level of resources to put into the
activity.
Qualitative data collection
Most qualitative data collection
is fairly expensive. Partly because the time and skills needed for the
analysis of the data creates expense.
If one of your benefits is
to convince the powers-that-be that you are worthy of promotion, then
qualitative data may not be the easiest to use for this purpose (depending
upon your discipline area). Most times you are better off having some
solid quantitative data.
Quantitative data collection
Quantitive data collection
is relative cheap to carry out and relatively cheap to analyse. Lots
of people can be processed and most statistical packages give you directly
usable tables and diagrams.
If your cost-benefit considerations
include things like:
I need to learn more about
evaluation processes
I want to develop
tools that will be more relevant
I am interested in
actual behavioural varaibles
then you may find that the
low cost is an illusion.
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