D3 looks forward to attending the American Evaluation Association’s annual conference from November 9^th to 14^th, 2015 in Chicago, Illinois. The theme for this year’s conference, “Exemplary Evaluations in a Multicultural World,” intends to spark conversations around designing and implementing rigorous evaluations that take into account diverse cultural contexts.

Stacey Frank and Kyle Block of D3 Systems are leading a skill building workshop, Putting Yourself in Respondents’ Shoes: Cognitive Testing for Cross-Cultural Interviewing.  Many international evaluators underestimate the cognitive complexity of responding to survey questions. This session will help participants break it down, describing the four primary cognitive steps involved in answering questions: comprehension, memory retrieval, judgment and estimation, and reporting. Armed with a fuller understanding of these cognitive steps, evaluators will be equipped to avoid common cognitive breakdowns and write survey questions with less measurement error. The workshop will be held on Friday, November 13^th from 8:00-9:30 am in Randolph. Download the slides here.

Matthew Warshaw and Stephen Hornbeck will present on the panel, Evaluation in Difficult and Conflict Environments, moderated by Tarek Ghani from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School.  Panelists will discuss challenges to evaluations in conflict and post-conflict environments, where the shifting landscape, widespread corruption, insecurity, and violence make conducting reliable and actionable evaluations difficult, yet not impossible. Drawing from more than twenty years of experience, members of the panel have worked as consultants on evaluations and in building and improving upon local evaluation capacity in difficult environments, such as the Afghanistan, the Balkans, Iraq and Pakistan. The panelists represent various organizations but are tied together in their work on USAID’s Measuring the Impact of Stabilization Initiatives (MISTI) project in Afghanistan. The panel will be held on Thursday, November 12^th from 3:00-4:30 pm in Buckingham.

Nina Sabarre will present on a panel titled, Cluster, Multi-site, and Multi-level evaluation in International settings. This presentation focuses more specifically on results from USAID’s MISTI project in Afghanistan. Panelists discuss the wide range of interventions implemented by seven different USAID projects working in thousands of villages in unstable districts across Afghanistan. Interventions ranged from improvements to small infrastructures, to health, education, vocational training and other activities implemented at the village level, typically through small grants. These activities shared the common objective of addressing local sources of instability by expanding and improving governance. The authors present on methods and key findings from MISTI’s effort to determine whether to what extent these projects effectively enhanced stability, community resilience, and government capacity. The panel will be held on Saturday, November 14^th from 7:00-7:45 am in Dusable.

Learn more about D3’s evaluation capabilities and past performance on impact and performance evaluations here.