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Company History Key People News Customer Profiles Contact Us Employment |
Category: Nonprofit Organizations Data Desk® Helps Save the Children - and the Kids - Sort Things Out There are many programs for socially excluded children and young people. But which ones really work, and why? This is an issue that Save the Children, the international children's rights organization, contends with on a daily basis. Carol Nevison, National Development Officer for Education, works in Save the Children's Newcastle office in northeastern England, where social and economic conditions mean that there is plenty of work to be done to realize children's rights and increase their participation in the communities in which they live. She says that while Save the Children does run and evaluate its own programs, it is more often the case that other youth-oriented organizations ask Save the Children for help in assessing their efforts. Evaluation of social programs has become a fairly technical discipline and can be dependent on statistics. Carol was trained as a statistician and worked in several corporate jobs before moving to social policy work with Save the Children, where a colleague introduced her to Data Desk. It revolutionized her approach to analysis. "I had been using a kind of standard, industrial-strength statistics package but found Data Desk so much easier to use." In trying to scope out a program's effectiveness, Carol typically looks at factors such as ethnicity, gender, group size, level of contact, and the topics and issues that come up with the young people. She relies most often on what she calls the "descriptive statistics" to look at central tendency and variability, especially contingency tables because they "allow you to filter by a third variable really easily." Even though her datasets are small compared to those that result from, say, scientific experiments, she believes Data Desk dramatically reduces her work time. "Now I do analysis that used to take me hours in ten minutes." Carol was so impressed with Data Desk's ease of use that she trained a group of young people to use it in one program. They carried out a research project from start to finish with support from Carol. The analysis stage was a key part of the project, and the kids got up to speed with the software fairly quickly. "What they did with Data Desk was quite simple - but sound." This is not surprising, because sound analyses, not automatically assured with any statistics program, are made easy with Data Desk. |
Name: Carol Nevison Organization: Save the Children Location: Newcastle, England
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