Selecting Benchmark and Sensitivity Analyses

Summary

Despite best efforts to be independent and impartial, and to let the data speak clearly, researchers must make difficult decisions that play a role in the findings that they produce from their impact evaluations. After specifying a research question about the effectiveness of a program, researchers face many decisions about how to operationalize the analysis—for example, how to clean contradictory data or which statistical approach they should use to estimate the program's impact.