Final exam Flashcards
What is monitoring?
Monitoring is a continuous process that tracks what is happening within a program and uses the data collected to inform program implementation and day-to-day management and decisions.
What 3 types of questions can answer evaluation?
- Descriptive questions. The evaluation seeks to determine what is taking place and describes processes, conditions, organizational relationships, and stakeholder views.
- Normative questions. The evaluation compares what is taking place to what should be taking place; it assesses activities and whether or not targets are accomplished. Normative questions can apply to inputs, activities, and outputs.
- Cause-and-effect questions. The evaluation examines outcomes and tries to assess what difference the intervention makes in outcomes. (Impact evaliation)
What is the evaluation?
Evaluations are periodic, objective assessments of a planned, ongoing, or completed project, program, or policy.
What are the 5 criteria for the program to be evaluated?
- Innovative. It is testing a new, promising approach.
- Replicable. The program can be scaled up or can be applied in a different setting.
- Strategically relevant. The program is a flagship initiative; requires substantial resources; covers, or could be expanded to cover, a large number of people; or could generate substantial savings.
- Untested. Little is known about the effectiveness of the program, globally or in a particular context.
- Influential. The results will be used to inform key policy decisions.
What is theory of change?
A theory of change is a description of how an intervention is supposed to deliver the desired results. It describes the causal logic of how and why a particular project, program, or policy will reach its intended outcomes.
what is a causal effect?
a causal effect is a change in some feature of the world that would result from a change to some other feature of the world.
the difference in the potential outcomes for some unit under two different treatment statuses
What is counterfactual comparisons?
It’s an experiment where at least one of the worlds we are comparing isn’t the real, factual world - it’s in our imaginations
What is treatment variable?
It’s X. used to describe any intervention in the world
What is outcome or dependent variable?
It’s Y
What are the fundamental problems of the casual inference?
- Individual cause effect can never be directly observed
- At any given time, we only observe any given unit in one state of affair (At a given time, a child either participates in deworming
program or not) - We can’t observe the difference: Yi(1) − Yi(0)
How do we make progress on answering casual questions if effects are fundamentally unobservable?
- Conduct a randomize trial, assigning some people for treatment and others no, and then comparing the average outcomes for people in the untreated group to the average outcomes for people in the treated group
What is potential outcome?
the potential outcome for some unit under some treatment status is the outcome that unit would experience under that treatment status
What is causal relationships?
Refers to the cause-and-effect connection between the treatment variable (X) and outcome variable (Y)
What are the 2 different conditions based on whether the individual receives the treatment?
- Treatment is the condition with the treatment (Xi=1)
- Control is the condition without the treatment (Xi=0)
What is the causal effect of X on Y?
It’s the change in the outcome variable Y caused by a change in the treatment variable X
When interpreting the sign of causal effects, we should interpret:
- a positive effect as the treatment causing an increase in the outcome variable
- a negative effect as the treatment causing a decrease in the outcome variable
- an effect of zero as the treatment causing no change in the outcome variable
What is the average treatment effect (average causal effect)?
It’s an average of the individual casual effects of X and Y across a group of individuals. It’s the average change in Y caused by a change in X for a group of individuals.
What is the randomized experiment?
it’s a type of study design in which treatment assignment is randomized
what is the purpose of randomize experiment?
by randomly assigning treatment, we ensure that treatment and control groups are, on average, identical ro each other in all observed and unobserved pre-treatment characteristics
What is the difference-in-means estimator?
it produces a valid estimate of the average treatment effect when the treatment and control groups are comparable with respect to all the variables that night affect the outcome other than the treatment variable itself
average_effect=average_treatment - average_control
What is experimental data?
data collected from a randomized experiment
what is observational data?
data collected about naturally occurring events. Studies that use observational data are called observational studies
How to set working directory to the folder containing the dataset using in R?
setwd(“way_to_the_folder”)
How to read a dataset in R?
read.csv(“name_of_dataset”)
what is head()?
shows first 5 observations
what is == in R?
the relational operator that evaluates whether two values are equal to each other. The output is a logical value: TRUE or FALSE
what is the function ifelse() stands for in R?
creates the contents of a new variable based on the values of an existing one: “if logical test is true, return this, else return that”.
Теоритично це дає можливість щось замінити на щось. Накриклад, якщо у нас текстовий показник, ми його можемо замінити на цифровий.
ifelse(data$var==”yes”, 1,0)
How to store values as a new variable?
data$var<-ifelse(data$var==”yes”, 1,0)
ifelse() is just an example