Lately, I have attended debates in which this question has been raised and the responses have been varied. What is your opinion?
It depends on the type of aid. Even the impact of a miso type of aid can be assessed from a cunatitativa or qualitative perspective. For example: the support for afforestation of agricultural land, can be measured in terms of number of hectares, or in terms of tons of carbon sequestered, but can also be measured in terms of landscape quality or attractive for rural tourism.
Access to service deliver can be qualitative indicator for assessing the impact of RD.
employment, income and expenditure on health, education, and housing etc can be quantitative indicators to assess the impact of RD.
Capacity and willingness to pay for various service deliver also be index
Whenever, We want to study the impact of any intervention regarding the development, then the evaluation of the impact can be made both on qualitative & quantitative basis. Quantitative data can be collected through survey on predesigned performae while qualitative data through various methods as in- depth interview and focus group discussion etc.
Alonso, like Francisco said, it all depends on the type of aid, now the problem just not begin from the type of aid given alone, the design of the study too, if you want to measure the aids given, you must have a proper indicator for measuring that aid, for example, you are interested in measuring the aids given in term of internally displaced persons, may be looking at their social welfare, what constitute social welfare, how do you measure social welfare? give a parameter for measuring social welfare, is it the number of people in the camp?, the number of people been given three meals every day? etc, it is after getting this straight then you can apply numeric strength data and do the coding before it can give you quantitative data for analysis. on the other hand, most quantitative data are difficult to bring out the real information, it is better a mix of the two methods are adopted for such studies, it is globally accepted to use a ix of two or more design.
While I agree with my earlier position that a combination of both methods are necessary, I will beg to disagree that qualitative methods alone cannot give you the right information. Why researchers in recent times are agitating for both quantitative and qualitative methods in development and gender research is that, quantitative tend to give you only figurative information which may not necessarily mean what the figures reflect in true situation. This is always as a result of design error. You are interested in looking at rural development, what constitute rural development? most beginners in the field find it difficult to really tel you what they mean by rural development, but an experienced researcher will give your measurable parameters or indicators to measure rural development, these are the data that you must collect in order to measure rural development. how do you measure rural development? is it the no of carrugated iron roofs, is it hospitals, health centers, security, motorable roads, portable drinking water, presence of police station, banks etc, after this, you can now know how to gather the information and the type of information to collect.
For Quantitative research, it is difficult to translate most of the information into analytical form, most often, researchers have to listen to hear say and as humans, Hurtton's effect sets in, in this situation, objectivity is near absence. another is that emotion normally sets in, by right researchers should be empathetic and not sympathetic, this is another disadvantage of qualitative research design. The best bait is to use a combination of both designs.
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