IMPACT EVALUATION SERIES: Interview Successful and Unsuccessful Participants (part 1 of 2)
One element of data collection for an Impact Evaluation involves interviews with participants in order to find examples of the best results and to identify those employees who have no or very little impact. You need only interview a subset of the graduates in order to generalize conclusions to the entire population. From Adoption Evaluation, review the list of participants that you classified as Unsuccessful Adoption: this is the list of potential individuals to interview.
Randomly select a sample from both groups. You interview enough people in the High-Impact category to find approximately ten best examples of impact. This may involve interviewing fifteen to twenty graduates or more. Note: the more examples found, the stronger is the correlation from this sample to the entire population. However, these numbers are based on the sample size (the number of graduates). With fifty graduates, it is likely that ten to fifteen are in the High-Impact category, which requires a lower number of interviews.
The critical factors affecting interviewing are the time and the budget to conduct the interviews. The more interviews that you can conduct the better, but it needs to be within time and budget constraints. For estimation purposes, a single High-Impact interview (conducting the interview and summarizing the result) takes approximately one hour.
Impact Interview Protocol
Follow the protocol below when conducting Impact interviews:
Inviting High Impact Participants to the Interview
Invite participants to the Impact interview via email. A sample email is:
Inviting Low/No Impact Participants to the Interview
High Impact Interview Template
Low/No Impact Interview Template
Previous Blogs in the Impact Evaluation Series
Collect Detailed Impact Data from Successfully Adopted Participants
