Impact evaluations in the time of Covid-19, Part 1

At Development Impact weve been trying to wrap our heads around what Covid-19 means for researchers conducting evaluations in the field. As such, we thought it would be useful to do a series of posts on different dimensions. Todays post focuses on the immediate response in terms of what the virus might mean for both interventions and ongoing surveys. Later posts will focus on changing your research design and survey methods (we will revisit the efficacy of phone surveys).

First of all, there is a fair amount of thoughtful guidance out there. Annie Duflo lays out IPAs response in this blog, and Iqbal Dhaliwal provides J-PALs heartfelt approach here.

Both of us manage teams that are doing a fair number of field based evaluations and we thought it would be worth laying out a couple of thoughts. Well start with the more general ones.

Now your project isnt going to be the same. Were going to tackle this in two pieces - data collection and the intervention/research question.

In terms of data collection, one obvious move would be to switch to a slimmed down phone survey. J-PAL has a blog post on resources. Its important to keep in mind that this is a significantly imperfect substitute for most projects. However, as field operations are halted, phone surveys may be crucial in documenting intermediary outcomes along the causal chain (see more on monitoring below). And we will be revisiting the pros and cons in a forthcoming post. In the meantime, from the archives, there are a number of posts from DI that might be helpful:

Another option would be to delay data collection altogether. You are likely to be in better shape if you were about to go for a baseline. This post gives us some thoughts on the pros and cons of investing in baselines.

And, if you are doing lab-in-the-field work, Busara has this nice compilation of ideas and options.

As the pandemic prevents from organizing group meetings and most countries have instituted work from home, this poses additional challengeswe will blog and propose ideas in the coming weeks on that.

Your intervention is likely to change. The key thing will be to keep up with whats going on and adapt (as much as possible) the research to the changes. If implementation is continuing (e.g., because this is a fundamental part of a safety net or vital infrastructure) then be prepared for the implementation modalities to shift. Some implementation is just going to be flat out delayed. Some thoughts:

Anyhow, we will be posting more as things evolve and people (including us) get more of a sense of how things are changing. Stay safe out there!

We realize that this pandemic is a rapidly changing situation. This blog post contains research discussions, and should not be taken as reflecting any official view of the World Bank. Please seehttps://www.worldbank.org/en/who-we-are/news/coronavirus-covid19to learn about how the World Bank is helping countries to respond.

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Impact evaluations in the time of Covid-19, Part 1