Metagora Training Materials
— Measuring Human Rights and Democratic Governance
The basic goals of the training materials are to enable:
- Policy makers to understand how appropriate quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection and analysis can inform the formulation of policy related to democratic governance and human rights;
- Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to understand the complementary roles of quantitative and qualitative data in their work related to democratic governance and human rights, and how to create statistically rigorous projects for data collection and analysis; and
- Data-oriented professionals to understand policy processes related to democratic governance and human rights, and to be able to conduct projects like those of the Metagora pilot phase.
Thus, the training materials help create a common ground of understanding among policy-makers, NGOs, and data-oriented professionals. For this reason, the training materials are designed to be accessible to several audiences, from policy-makers and NGO practitioners with no statistical or mathematical training, to statisticians practicing in the field.
The Metagora training materials are not in the format of a course, do not contain practice problems, and are not sequential in nature. Rather, in order to meet the needs of various users, the training materials include several components:
- Guidelines for Informing Policy via Data. These guidelines form the heart of the training materials and are a good starting point for the reader. They are designed to be accessible to policy-makers and data-oriented professionals alike, and assume no formal mathematical training at the college level.
- Case Study. The case study allows users of the training materials to “witness” an entire project in action, thereby gaining a greater sense of the decisions that are made, the set-backs that can occur, and the process in general.
- Encyclopedia of Terms. The encyclopedia covers names and brief histories of the organisations that implemented the Metagora pilot projects, descriptions of statistical concepts, explanations of acronyms, and other topics mentioned in the guidelines and the case study.
- Example Tools and Documents. This section is an additional web page with links to documents and materials used during the Metagora pilot projects. At the point the reader is ready to organise a data-collection and/or analysis project, these documents can serve as templates.
Although we have chosen to use a web site as the basic medium through which the training materials will be made available to the European and greater international community, CDs and hard copies of these training materials will be available from us at a future date.
These Training Materials were elaborated by Mrs. Jana Asher and Mrs. Claire Naval on the basis of documents and inputs provided by the Metagora Partners. They have undergone an extensive peer review process, which included members of the Metagora Community as well as external high-level experts.
Readers are encouraged to quote or reproduce material from the Metagora Training Materials website for their own work. In return, the Metagora project requests due acknowledgment as well as a feedback concerning the work that was carried out based on the use of these materials.
The Training Materials are published under the sole responsibility of its authors and of the Metagora Co-ordination Team. The views and opinions expressed in these materials do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the OECD or of donor institutions.
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