Choosing and planning ethical evaluations

Content for Thursday, April 17, 2025

Readings

• “Generating random numbers”
• “The ultimate guide to generating synthetic data for causal inference”
• Paul Hünermund and Beyers Louw, “On the Nuisance of Control Variables in Regression Analysis” (Hünermund and Louw 2020-06-01, 2020) (click on the PDF link in the right sidebar)
• “Types of Evaluation,” National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
  • ugh that link got DOGEd; download it from here instead or from archive.org
• Chapters 11–13 in Impact Evaluation in Practice (Gertler et al. 2016)
• Chapter 15 in The Effect (Huntington-Klein 2021) (skim this)

Slides

The slides for today’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.

View all slides in new window Download PDF of all slides

Tip

Fun fact: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.

Videos

Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.

• Introduction
• Types of evaluations
• Model- and design-based inference
• Ethics and open science

You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:

In-class stuff

Here are all the materials we’ll use in class:

• Week 13 FAQ slides (PDF)
• Control variables in social science
• Live R script

References

Gertler, Paul J., Sebastian Martinez, Patrick Premand, Laura B. Rawlings, and Christel M. J. Vermeersch. 2016. Impact Evaluation in Practice. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank. https://doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-0779-4.

Hünermund, Paul, and Beyers Louw. 2020-06-01, 2020. “On the Nuisance of Control Variables in Regression Analysis.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.10314.

Huntington-Klein, Nick. 2021. The Effect: An Introduction to Research Design and Causality. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman and Hall / CRC. https://theeffectbook.net/.