Language data There is little information available on the languages crisis-affected people speak and understand. Humanitarians often develop communication strategies without reliable data on literacy, languages spoken, or preferred means of communication. The result too often is that crisis-affected people struggle to communicate with humanitarian organizations in a language they understand. Women, children, older people, and people with disabilities are often at the greatest disadvantage because they are less likely to understand international languages and lingua francas. TWB’s Language Data Initiative addresses those issues and provides important resources for humanitarians. It supports humanitarian organizations to develop language-informed programs and communication strategies. Click on a country on the map below to see language data, resources, and maps that we have available for that country. This map will update as new data is published in the future.

In our work at BehaviourWorks Australia (BWA) we are frequently asked ‘What does the research say about getting audience Y to do behaviour X?’. When our partners need an urgent answer we often provide it using a Rapid Review. In this article I explain Rapid Reviews, why you should do them, and a process that you can follow to conduct one. What is a Rapid Review? Rapid Reviews are “a form of knowledge synthesis in which components of the systematic review process are simplified or omitted to produce information in a timely manner” [1]. Indeed, with sufficient resources (e.g., multiple staff working simultaneously) you can do a Rapid Review in less than a day. The outputs of these reviews are, of course, brief and descriptive, but they can be very useful where rapid evidence is needed, for example, in addressing COVID-19. Rapid Reviews can therefore provide detailed research within reduced timeframes and also meet most academic requirements by being standardised and reproducible. They are often, but not always, publishable in peer-reviewed academic journals.

The Research Methods Knowledge Base is a comprehensive web-based textbook that addresses all of the topics in a typical introductory undergraduate or graduate course in social research methods. It covers the entire research process including: formulating research questions; sampling (probability and nonprobability); measurement (surveys, scaling, qualitative, unobtrusive); research design (experimental and quasi-experimental); data analysis; and, writing the research paper. It also addresses the major theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of research including: the idea of validity in research; reliability of measures; and ethics.

We are a global collaboration aimed at improving evaluation practice and theory through co-creation, curation, and sharing information.

Isolation measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 means that social researchers who have for doing fieldwork in a pandemic - specifically, ideas for avoiding in-person interactions by using mediated forms that will achieve similar ends. Social research has been conducted online for many years, of course. There are many examples of using online survey tools or doing content analyses or ethnographies using existing online interactions as research materials. Interviews have been conducted by phone or Skype for a long time. This document was initially directed at ways for how to turn fieldwork that was initially planned as using face-to-face methods into a more ‘hands-off’ mode. However, people have added useful material about ‘born digital’ research (content already generated on the internet by online interactions), which provides an alternative source of social research materials if researchers decide to go down that path.

This class covers a range of different topics that build on top of each other. For example, in the first tutorial, you will learn how to collect data from Twitter, and in subsequent tutorials you will learn how to analyze those data using automated text analysis techniques. For this reason, you may find it difficult to jump towards one of the most advanced issues before covering the basics. Introduction: Strengths and Weaknesses of Text as Data Application Programming Interfaces Screen-Scraping Basic Text Analysis Dictionary-Based Text Analysis Topic Modeling Text Networks Word Embeddings

This website offers practical tools helping relief and development practitioners understand and tackle the barriers that prevent people from following the desired behaviours.