CRRC’s Fifth Annual Methodological Conference: In Search of Methodological Innovation

CRRC’s fifth annual Methodological Conference took place on June 23 and 24, 2017 in Tbilisi. This year the conference’s focus was on policy analysis in the South Caucasus, and the search for methodological innovation. Over 50 participants representing institutions in the United States, United Kingdom, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia, and Canada attended.

Alexis Diamond of the Keck Graduate Institute (KGI), San Francisco gave an opening address for the conference titled: Deliberate ignorance: The dangers of knowing too much too soon. The talk covered a wide range of issues in evaluation, however, emphasis was placed on the importance of honest evaluation.

The first day of the conference had four sessions, with papers on a wide variety of subjects from the geographies of polarization and inequality in Tbilisi to a field experiment on marshrutka safety and a machine learning approach to profiling tax awareness in Armenia. 

The opening slide of David Sichinava’s presentation on Spatial Patterns of Emerging Inequalities in Tbilisi, Georgia.

The second day of the conference was dedicated to workshops. Alexey Levinson of the Levada Center, Moscow lead a workshop on open-ended group discussions and Aaron Erlich of McGill University discussed the fundamentals of multiple imputation. The conference also included workshops on case studies in public health, web surveys, and synthetic controls.

Aaron Erlich discussing why and when to use multiple imputation.

For more information, the full conference program can be accessed here.