Past Events

Findings of Research: Opportunities for Teenagers Leaving Ophanages

Mr. Aghanemat Aghayev, CRRC-UNICEF fellow 2008 presented findings of his research fellowship on Opportunities for teenagers leaving orphanages on February 13^th, 2009 at CRRC-Azerbaijan.

The purpose of this research was to investigate the future opportunities of the teen-agers leaving orphanages in Azerbaijan. While conducting his research, Mr. Aghayev focused on the life experience of the target group and studied social and economic resources available for teenagers after they leave orphanages; governmental social protection programs that directly address the target group and their outcomes; other protection programs run by local and international social institutions in Azerbaijan.

The presentation was followed by questions and answers session. Many government officials - mainly from the Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies, Ministry of Health, National Bank of Azerbaijan - and a great number of NGO representatives attended the presentation and expressed their interest in getting more information about the research methodology and data availability.

Training on Sampling Methods

CRRC-Azerbaijan held a training workshop on Sampling Methods, delivered by Kamil Aliyev, who got his Masters in Social Work from Washington University in St Louis and currently teaches statistics, research methods and program evaluation at Baku State University.

Online readings were followed by two 3-hour live interactive sessions on January 26 and January 30. The trainer covered a broad range of topics including the overview of research process and its phases, fundamentals in sampling: population & sample, non-probability & probability sampling, types of sampling designs, representativeness.

Social science students and NGO practitioners participated in the training. Participants shared the sampling experience from the research conducted by them. The CRRC director briefed the training participants on the sampling methodology used in CRRC 2008 Data Initiative survey, as well as the challenges and limitations that the DI team faced during the survey work.

Workshop participants expressed their interest in attending similar trainings and acquiring practical skills in sampling.

Data Analysis with SPSS

A series of training workshops on data analysis was organized by CRRC in December. The workshops were delivered by Anar Veliyev, who got his master in Public Policy at School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington and Ph.D. in Urban and Public Affairs from University of Louisville in Kentucky, and is currently a research fellow at Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy.

Workshops were attended by the participants from academia, NGO sector, as well students and junior researchers. Participants were introduced to the basic concepts of statistics and data analysis and instructed to apply the acquired skills on CRRC Data Initiative database. CRRC’s Data Initiative is among very few independent household surveys conducted in the region that covers a wide range of issues. The training started with data input and data coding and continued with the sessions on data exploration (frequency distributions, descriptive statistic, and graphic representation of the distribution of variables), cross-tabulations, correlation and regression analysis. Participants chose variables for analysis that were closely related to their work and educational background. Due to the growing interest of participants in further aspects of data analysis, the trainer provided a few additional sessions to cover the issues of data interpretation and model building using SPSS. Several concepts were explained on the example of the research methodology that the trainer used in his PhD dissertation. Participants had a chance to discuss papers authored by the trainer that contained analysis models constructed via SPSS.

Course evaluations reflected a very positive feedback on the training. Taking into consideration a great number of applicants, CRRC plans to continue trainings on data analysis in future.

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