If your work or research is to address poverty and equality, our online course will help you understand, design and implement mixed methods research and evaluations.
While there are many courses on conducting and applying quantitative analysis, and some on qualitative methods, relying on just one method would restrict the complex understanding of layered crises today. This course is unique in that it highlights ways in which both quantitative and qualitative methods can be brought together, to more effectively examine poverty and inequality reduction.
Moreover, there is limited knowledge sharing on ways that this can be applied to study poverty and inequality, what are common challenges and pitfalls, and how to overcome these to provide policy-relevant advice.
Our highly experienced facilitators are best-placed to provide the latest thinking in mixed methods research and evaluations, that are contextually-rich and reflect periods of rapid change.
The course is convened by Vidya Diwakar, a Research Fellow at IDS and the Deputy Director of the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network. She is a mixed-methods researcher and policy analyst, with over a decade of experience working in think tanks and universities. Her work focuses on gender-disaggregated drivers of poverty escapes, armed conflict and intersecting crises as drivers of poverty traps, and the role of multi-sectoral programming in supporting sustained poverty reduction. Vidya has led policy-oriented research and evaluation studies on poverty in parts of East and West Africa, South Asia and South East Asia.
The guest facilitators are:
Joseph Simbaya, Director of the Institute of Economic and Social Research at the University of Zambia. Joseph holds a PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands and has over 20 years of experience of teaching, training and mixed methods research focused on poverty, crises, gender, and education.
Lucia da Corta, CPAN Associate. Lucia studied at the University of Oxford before moving to the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network to design and teach qualitative methods for research and evaluations on poverty and inequality. She has over two decades of field research experience in countries throughout Africa and South Asia.
Emmanuel Tumusiime, Senior Manager, Evidence and Learning Team, World Vision US. Emmanuel holds a PhD in agricultural economics. He is an applied researcher, evaluator and development practitioner with over 12 years of experience providing program design, research, and evaluation support services in various low-income countries.
- Quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods researchers
- Donors and programme designers
- Knowledge management staff
- Civil society practitioners
- Government officials
- Evaluators
- Masters and PhD students studying relevant subjects
- Policy analysts and advisers
- Humanitarian consultants
Past participants have come from organisations such as the World Food Programme, Unicef, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, Engineers Without Borders Australia and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
IDS short courses provide a unique opportunity to bring your own challenges and experiences relating to your work or research for discussion.
Our training also enables you to grow your professional network and learn from others working in the field of poverty and inequality.
Our online course is designed with busy international development professionals and practitioners in mind. It combines live lectures, webinars, readings, case studies and group work.
It will run over four weeks on Wednesdays in April 2025, with specific webinar times to be confirmed. Participation in the course (during and outside of the real-time sessions) will require approximately 4-5 hours of your time per week, which includes 2-3 hours per week of live sessions.
There will be a pre-course induction to introduce the digital learning platform and help you with any technical queries before the course beings. This can be done flexibly at your own time before the course commences.
Each week will involve a webinar with an interactive presentation and discussion from highly experienced mixed methods researchers and practitioners from institutions based in the Global South and the Global North. The outline of the course curriculum is presented below:
Week 1: Theory and concepts of poverty and inequality, linked to underlying methods of analysis
- Clarity on key terms and concepts
- Individualist and structural theories and frameworks, and overview of how they are operationalised in data collection and analysis
- Change-based conceptualizations: e.g. poverty and inequality dynamics
Week 2: Methods overview
- Summarise quantitative methodologies for understanding and evaluating poverty and inequality outcomes, dynamics and correlates
- Present qualitative methodologies to distinguish proximate and deeper causes of poverty and inequality, and trace sequence of events, strategies, processes explaining different outcomes
- Discussion of strengths and weaknesses of these methods, and interrogating the potential for mixed methods research for strengthening causal claims
Week 3: Designing and analysing mixed methods research amidst rapid change
- Reviewing the existing data landscape, both quantitative and qualitative, including cross- and within-country databases, indicators, indices, and online repositories that could be innovatively combined
- Data collection and analysis: outlining forms of flexible iteration and sequencing through mixed methods research
- Working through research examples based on actual poverty/inequality studies
- Discuss the advantages, challenges encountered, lessons learnt
Week 4: Applications for poverty and inequality evaluations amidst rapid change
- Working through a programme evaluation example
- Working through modified tools for life history and other interviews to address single issues of current relevance (e.g. Covid policy).
- Deriving policy/programme implications from mixed methods evaluations
After completing this course, you will be able to:
- Understand the range of qualitative and quantitative methods on poverty and critically assess their relative merits
- Combine quantitative and qualitative methods in the design of mixed methods research and evaluations on (monetary and multidimensional) poverty and inequality
- Analyse mixed methods data on poverty and inequality (dynamics) to provide policy-relevant advice on leaving no one behind, including in complex, rapidly changing contexts
- Critically assess the strength of mixed methods research and evaluations
