My Official Thesis Acknowledgements

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to firstly thank my supervisor, Alec Fearon. His mentoring style, philosophical mind, diagramming abilities, humour, and care helped me immensely throughout the year. I am a better researcher and thinker because of him.

I would like to thank Dennis Silverwood, for aiding me in improving my work through his insights, criticisms, and tough questions.

I would like to acknowledge Eddie Borup, for being my exploratory guide through the United Nations Development Programme; for occasionally bringing me out of the archival dead-end.

I would like to recognise Ned Robins, for sparking and fuelling my interest in risk management.

I would like to thank my friends. I endured because of them.

Finally, I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to my family. Completing this thesis would have not been possible without their support, their prayers, and their belief in me. My special thanks to my twin-sister, for being my constant source of encouragement.

Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam

Printed and Posted

Haven't updated this thesis in a while! For obvious reasons, I  have neen extremely busy writing and compiling my thesis.

Just got it printed today and submitted online! Going to submit tomorrow.

It's been quite a journey. :) And I've enjoyed the ride.

Should I be upset?

After some back breaking data crunching, I finally finished coding through 304 documents! I tried some initial analysis using SPSS and it seems like my data is not looking so good. :( 

Although I don't think I should be upset, as I think there is a pattern emerging that I can make some sense of. I'm running through some other descriptive statistical tools and trying some non-parametric tests to get some reaffirmation of these initial figures. 

Note: I'm not a statistics expert, but I'm quite relieved that when I opened the statistics books I can still seem to understand majority of it. Yeay! I'm really excited to do some analysis... but right now I'm just really tired from the coding I've been through.

Click images to enlarge!

Progress: 18 July 2012

I'm getting some progress with my work and just happy to present these diagrams that seem to make the sense out of my work (more than my write up). After much deliberation on my research structure, I have decided this will by my methodology scheme:

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Also I've finally made sense of the documents I'm using! I've tied it up with my discussion on UNDP. Basically it's going to be the documents on the programme level + UNDAF. Still trying to decide whether to include documents on the project level.

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Research Structure

This picture from Krippendorff shows an idea of how I am going about my research method:

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Although, this doesn't entirely capture what I want to do... Since I'm not sure I'm using content analysis alone. I think it is more like I'm building cases out of the documents; and I'm using content analysis + (something else, i.e. discourse analysis/semiotics/observations?) to make sense of the documents...

So the picture below maybe a better representation (my inputs in red)...

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I plan to construct 15 mini (pseudo) cases to represent the risk management and outcome phenomena in each country; and I would then compare those similar phenomena to make an inference.

Does that sound sensible?

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KRIPPENDORFF, K. 2004. Content analysis : an introduction to its methodology, Thousand Oaks, Calif., Sage.

Documents Thus Far

I'm streamlining my data... So far I have shortlisted my sources of documents to the following categoreis

Region: Europe and CIS
Timeframe: Programme cycles that fall between 2005 to 2011
Countries: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia,  Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Romania, Serbia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Documents to be analysed:

1. UNDAF
2. CPD (past cycle and on-going cycle)
3. CPAP (past cycle and on-going cycle)
4. ADR (if any) - or - Country Programme Performance Summary (if without ADR)

Given the above list... I am looking potentially at 90 document (1 UNDAF, 2 CPDs, 2 CPAPS, 1 ADR/Summary for each country) already... I'm still deliberating if it will be necessary to look into the additional documents. Aside from the constraint of time and the sheer amount of volume of documents, I've listed my reservations about some of the documents.

1. Outcome Evaluations - Reservation(s): Not all country programmes have outcome evaluations for the specified period. And only selected outcomes are evaluated. Advantage(s): it would list the projects and outputs that contribute to achieving the outcomes.    
2. Project documents - Reservations(s): I'm still undecided whether I should look in depth into project documents since I'm looking at the programme level; maybe I could use it as a support. There is a risk that I would look at the thesis on the project level. Advantage(s): since the programme documents (so far) have not given me quality data for risk management, maybe the project documents could give me insights:  
3. Project evaluations - my reservations and advantages are the same as #2

I guess the question here really is:

Is the country programme documents sufficient to prove a point? If not then I would need to look into project documents.

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Here are the sources for the documents

UNDP Europe and CIS Country Programme documents (UNDAF and CPD):
http://europeandcis.undp.org/news/show/8EEC429C-F203-1EE9-BB5E744EAA529CF8

ERC Website (UNDAF, Outcome and Project Reports):
http://erc.undp.org/

Assessment of Development Results Reports
http://web.undp.org/evaluation/country-evaluation.html

Also know that... not all country offices would have ADRs, but instead would have a Country Programme Performance Summary. I haven't found a repository... but through persistent search using the keywords "UNDP" and "Country Programme Performance" all the relevant summaries can be found.

Finding a Way Forward

After some correspondence with Eddie, Dennis and Alec... I think I have gathered my confidence that all is not lost! (Read about my panic attack here).

Right after the meeting with Dennis, it seemed clearer what I needed to do. I tried to organise the documents I have and what information I am going to gather from those documents to address my research objectives: