Matt Juden, Tichaona Mapuwei, Till Tietz, Rachel Sarguta, Lily Medina, Audrey Prost, Macartan Humphreys, Alan Jacobs, Elizabeth Allen, Henry Mwambi and Calum Davey. (2023) “Process Outcome Integration with Theory (POInT): academic report.” CEDIL Research Project Paper 5. London and Oxford: CEDIL

Edoardo Masset, Sam Shrestha, and Matt Juden. (2021). “Evaluating Complex Interventions in International Development.” CEDIL Methods Working Paper 6. London and Oxford: CEDIL

Matt Juden and Ian Mitchell. (2021) “Cost-effectiveness and synergies for emissions mitigation projects in developing countries.” CGD Policy Paper 204. Washington, DC: Center for Global Development.

Nancy Cartwright, Lucy Charlton, Matt Juden, Tamlyn Munslow and Richard Beadon Williams. (2020) “Making Predictions of Programme Success More Reliable,” CEDIL Methods Working Paper 1. London and Oxford: CEDIL

Alan Gelb, Vijaya Ramachandran, Matt Juden, and Alice Rossignol. (2018). “Should Countries Be More Like Shopping Malls? A Proposal For Service Performance Guarantees.” Development Policy Review. 37(4), pp.526–545.

Vijaya Ramachandran, Matthew Collin and Matt Juden. (2018). “De-risking: An Unintended Negative Consequence of AML/CFT Regulation”, in Colin King, Clive Walker and Jimmy Gurulé (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of Criminal and Terrorism Financing Law. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.237-272.

Michael Pisa and Matt Juden. (2017). “Blockchain and Economic Development: Hype vs. Reality.” CGD Policy Paper 107. Washington, DC: Center for Global Development.

Michael Anderson, Matt Juden, and Andrew Rogerson. (2016). “After Brexit: New Opportunities for Global Good in the National Interest.” CGD Policy Paper 089. Washington, DC: Center for Global Development.

Matthew Collin, Louis De Koker, Matthew Juden, Joseph Myers, Vijaya Ramachandran, Amit Sharma, and Gaiv Tata. (2015). “Unintended Consequences of Anti-Money Laundering Policies for Poor Countries.” CGD Working Group Report. Washington, DC: Center for Global Development.

PhD Thesis

Matt Juden. 2021. “Towards a multi-dimensional model of impact evaluation quality: assessing development impact evaluation methods with respect to context.” PhD Thesis.

MSc Dissertation

Matt Juden. 2014. “Realist randomised controlled trials of development interventions in practice: concrete design suggestions to address the problem of external validity.” MSc Dissertation.

In addition to my research, I wrote 24 blogs for the Center for Global Development.

One of them features an interview I gave to Chinese state broadcaster CCTV’s Africa channel.

Lots of them contain pretty graphs!

At SOAS, I have worked as a tutor, assisting with the teaching of Critical Reasoning in Contemporary Development Studies at the undergraduate level and Gender and Development at the postgraduate level.

I enjoy building rapport with students as well as the process of eliciting understanding of difficult concepts, and have received consistently excellent feedback from students and under peer observation. The following are examples of anonymous student feedback:

“The tutorials from Matt Juden were very well organized, everyone gets the opportunity to talk and the discussions were very interesting.”

“Matt Juden my tutorial leader was very good, approachable, informed and engaging.”

I also spent three years teaching English as a foreign language to students of all ages and backgrounds, individually and in groups of all sizes at universities and private language schools in Egypt, France and Germany.

At the Université de Rennes I convened and examined courses in English for academic purposes for classes of students of different disciplines at masters and undergraduate level over a full academic year. At Wall Street Institute Rennes (now Rennes Language Center) I was acting teaching manager, designing pedagogical strategies for students and scheduling teachers.

Title

Towards a multi-dimensional model of impact evaluation quality: assessing development impact evaluation methods with respect to context

Abstract

In this thesis, I give an account of the quality of impact evaluation methods for development interventions that goes beyond internal validity considerations to also incorporate the transferability of findings to new contexts. To investigate how well different impact evaluation methods facilitate transferability, I adapt tools from realist synthesis to extract and synthesise the programme theories that underpin a set of evaluations of the same intervention-outcome pair. From this synthesis of programme theory, I derive the markers of intervention causation in context (MICCs) that an impact evaluation of an intervention of that type would have to report to facilitate the transferability of findings. I systematically build a complete set of impact evaluations for two intervention-outcome pairings, and apply my method to these two cases. This generates case-specific insights such as identifying evidence gaps where minimal further data generation offers large gains in understanding. Further, the analysis generates cross-case insights such as the tendency to better report causally significant features of intervention implementation than causally significant features of context. Most importantly, the analysis suggests there is no association between method choice and the facilitation of transferability, in theory or in practice. I argue that we can nonetheless improve on ‘there is no gold standard’ by showing how generating a middle-range theory of intervention causation capable of underpinning the list of MICCs for a type of intervention provides a guide to evaluation method choice and to transferring results between contexts.

In parallel, to render my main results more useful to the relevant experts and therefore more likely to influence practice, I conduct semi-structured interviews with development intervention evaluation experts. I identify a broad discursive trend in favour of theory-based evaluation and a nascent interest in the use of middle-range theories to underpin transferability. I therefore frame my main results in these terms.

Download PDF