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Issues of Dealing with Missing Values

Published on: 2022-05-20نُشِرَ بتاريخ: 2022-05-20

A lot of data analysis programs do not have the ability to distinguish between many values, namely:
· Missing Values
· Blanks
· Zero

This weakness of data analysis programs also extends to the failure of many data analysts to distinguish between these values, therefore, these values are not being distinguished or dealt with, and data are not being analyzed based on these differences.

Some may think that these differences are not very important, and they ignore them and leave dealing with them to data analysis programs, but in most cases, this gives catastrophic results that many people do not realize.

I will attempt to illustrate these differences through some examples:

1. If we want to analyze the average income of households in a country suffering from a crisis, it was noticed that a high percentage of respondents said that they have no income of any kind, and the percentage of these respondents is over 40% of the surveyed families. Data analysts dealt with these cases as missing values, the thing that gave results that are utterly different from the situation of society, as the socio-economic indicators in this case will show, for example, that only 10% of HHs are below the extreme poverty line, but the truth is that the percentage is more than 50%, because whoever does not have any income must be considered as his income is zero rather than a missing value, because the missing value is not included in the calculations, while the value zero is, and thus affects the percentages and the general average of income. In the opposite case, in the event of asking about the monthly salary, the salary of a person who does not have a job will be considered as a missing value rather than a zero, as he is unemployed and the salary is not calculated as a zero.
2. Many programs do not consider the blanks in the text questions as a missing value. For example, we find that the SPSS program does not consider the empty cell in the text questions as a missing value, but rather considers it a valid value, as in the Gender column, if it is a text question, the program will calculate the empty values, the thing that significantly affects results such as percentages, knowing that those who did not indicate their gender (male or female) should be considered a missing value.
3. In the SPSS, when trying to calculate a new data column from other columns, we find that some of the codes (formulas) can deal with the missing values effectively and some formulas cannot, for example when trying to calculate the total number of the family members out of the family members of each group, and we used the (sum) formula. We notice that SPSS gives the sum result even if there is a missing value in one of the categories, while calculating as a manual sum will give the sum result as a missing value when any of the cases with a missing value is encountered.

The cases in which there are issues in defining the missing values are unlimited, and I do not advise in any case to give the data analysis program nor the data analyst alone the freedom to guess and deal with those values, as the appropriate treatment and definition of the empty value must be determined, as we explained in the income case, the missing value must be considered as zero, while in the salary case, it must be considered a missing value, and in our third example, the empty cells of any category of family members must be considered zero, knowing that from the beginning, data collectors must be told that if a family does not have any member of a certain category, they must not leave a missing value, rather, they should fill it with a zero.

By:
Ghaith Albahr: CEO of INDICATORS

Local Community Perceptions Regarding Services and Decision Making Processes in NW Syria

Published on: 2022-06-03نُشِرَ بتاريخ: 2022-06-03

Large territories in northern Syria have been controlled by various opposition and other forces and non-state actors, after these territories were liberated from the control of the Syrian regime. While these entities govern the liberated areas, and are in charge of the affairs of the Syrians residing there by providing public services, maintain security, and resolve disputes, it is important to note that there is no single administrative and military entity which has a monopoly of control across the different parts of the region.
The present study was conducted to find out the reality of the liberated Syrian north, through identifying the entities responsible for governing each of these pieces of land, the status of public service provision and the level of citizen satisfaction, as well as understanding the state of affairs in terms of security, criminality, access to justice, and rule of law. Finally, the study aims to shed light to the decision-making mechanisms for important issues within the region, the extent to which citizens can participate in these mechanisms, and external influence on the governance and decision-making processes of the region.
The research has been designed and executed during the first half of 2021 in Idlib, Olive Branch and Euphrates Shield areas. It is based on field research involving survey of Syrians both from host communities and internally displaced persons (IDP’s) residing in the research area, and complemented with interviews with key informants (KIIs) from local government bodies or non-government organizations (NGOs).
The results of the study demonstrate a low level of knowledge of the residents of northern Syria of those responsible for governance and the provision of public services, mainly due to confusion between service providers and those responsible for managing the sector concerned. Another important result is in general, the residents of the region have low level of satisfaction for the services provided, which is being observed across all three regions.
With regard to the security situation, Idlib was the safest area according to the opinions of key informants and participants in the survey, where Hay’at Tahrir Al Sham was able to firmly control the security situation in the area and deal to a large extent with the security threats of bombings and kidnappings. Theft remains the main security concern in Idlib. In the areas of Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch, the level of safety was found to be very low, where both areas suffer from explosions targeting markets and residential areas as well as many cases of theft, kidnappings, killings and factional fighting. The people of Olive Branch area suffer especially from the seizing of their rights and property by military factions, and are being subject to arbitrarily arrest and kidnapping and have to pay funds get released.

observation – Field heroes 4

Published on: 2018-11-04نُشِرَ بتاريخ: 2018-11-04

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A series of guides for the data collectors to increase their skills in data collection for various research sectors.

Titles of the guides:

1. Data Collection ethics.

2. Individual and KI interviews.

3. Focus Group Discussion.

4. Field visit/Observation.

the fourth and final guide of the Field Heroes series, which provides an explanation of the appropriate mechanisms and procedures for collecting data through observation, which is usually done through a field visit to the project site.

The observation is one of the most important tools of data collection because it helps us to obtain information about the expressed needs, which are more credible than the felt needs of the people, and it’s also the main tool in the methodology of Design Thinking developed by Ideo to help create innovative products.

Worked on this guide:

Ghath Humaidan: manager of data collection teams

Khaled Brram: data analysis officer

Emad Al-Sari: market analysis specialist

Anas Jamous: field coordinator for data collection

Azzam Al-hadi: data quality officer

supervision Ghaith Al Bahr consultant in statistical Studies

Design: Omar Ghafrah- Faysal Al-Mashhadani

Report language: Arabic

Ordinal Questions , Challenges and Issues

Published on: 2022-05-23نُشِرَ بتاريخ: 2022-05-23

The ordinal questions, where the participant is asked to answer several options in order of priority contain many issues.
I will talk through my observation of many cases about these questions focusing on the negatives points:
1. The process of arranging options according to the most important and less important is a cumbersome and time-consuming process, so it is noted that most participants do not answer them seriously, and therefore the order obtained is inaccurate.
2. In the questions in which we choose the most three important answers in an orderly way, the order tends to follow the order of the same answers in the design of the questionnaire, meaning that the participants tend to choose the answers that are mentioned to them at the beginning as the most important.
3. A big problem with the analysis of the ordinal questions is due to the weakness of most statistical programs, and the lack of ready-made analytical methods for these questions, so the data analyst is forced to do manual calculations, which causes issues in the analysis.
4. A problem in the outputs of the analysis: -Calculating the order as weights will give a result that may exceed the real value, meaning that the numerical result that we will get does not express a real value, but rather expresses the weight and importance of this option compared to the other options and not the percentage of those who chose it.
-Many data analysts have difficulty dealing with these questions, so they tend to use inappropriate methods such as displaying the analysis of the first priority only, displaying the analysis of each priority separately, or analyzing the question as a usual multi-select question.
-An error in calculating weights, the weighting system in statistics is not arbitrary, that is, in cases, it is considered in the form of degrees 1, 2, 3, or in the form of probabilities or percentages of the original answers…etc.
-An error in defining the weights of the answers, as the first priority should take the number 3 and the third should take the number 1, knowing that the logical order is the opposite, but as a final value it must give a higher number to the first priority, and this is usually the mistake that some data analysts made.
5. Issues with the report writers where some of them are confused about how to present and discuss the results in the report correctly.
6. Problems in the disaggregation of ordinal questions with other questions, as the question exists in several columns in the database, in addition to the need to take into account the weights, and to the disaggregation with one or more questions, which leads to many data analysts to make mistakes in analyzing these questions

By:
Ghaith Albahr: CEO of INDICATORS

Outliers Processing

Published on: 2022-05-20نُشِرَ بتاريخ: 2022-05-20

Some data analysts do not grant any attention to outliers, and they may have first heard this term while reading this article. Outliers have a significant impact on many statistical indicators, and the methods of handling and processing them are related to many factors, some of which are simple, and some are more complex and related to the type of statistical indicator, as the data analyst must know the classification of the Smooth Parameters and the that’s not, and this indicates the degree to which it is affected by the outliers.

For example, the mean is considered one of the best indicators/coefficients of central tendency, but it is extremely affectable by outliers compared to the median, knowing that the median is not considered an accurate coefficient compared to the mean.

Within the following lines, I will try to tackle an important aspect related to the outliers, which is the simplest, it’s the methods of processing outliers:

Methods of processing outliers:
1. Revision of the source: we revise the source in order to check the value, if there is an entry mistake, it is corrected, such as writing the age for a study about children as 22 by mistake instead of 2, so, we simply discover that it is an entry mistake and correct it.
2. Logical processing of outliers: Mistakes of outliers can be discovered through logical processing, simply, when studying the labor force, for example, the data of a person who is 7 years old are deleted because he is not classified as a labor force.
3. Distinguishing between what to keep and what to delete: This process is considered very exhausting, as there are no precise criteria for accepting or rejecting outliers. In this regard, SPSS program offers a useful feature, which is classifying outliers into two types, Outliers (which are between the first/third quartile and one and a half of the inter-quartile range), and Extreme values (which are between one and a half to three times the inter-quartile range), in other words, data far from the center of the data and data extremely far from it, in this case this classification can be adopted by accepting outliers and deleting extreme values.
4. Replacing the outliers that have been deleted: The last and most sensitive step is the decision to deal with the deleted outliers, whether to keep them deleted (as missing values) or replace them, the challenge begins with the decision to replace them, as leaving them as missing values entails consequences and challenges, similarly, replacing them also entails consequences and challenges. The decision of replacing deleted outliers is followed by the appropriate methodology for replacement, as the process of replacing missing values is also complicated and has various methodologies and options, each of these methodologies will have an impact in a way on the results of data analysis (I will talk about replacing missing values in another post).

It is not simple to summarize the methodologies for dealing with outliers within these few lines, as deleting outliers puts us in front of other options; shall we leave it as a missing value or replace it with alternative values? Also, when we delete outliers and reanalyze the data, we will find that new outliers have appeared, these values were not considered outliers considering the database before it was modified (before deleting the outliers in the first stage), therefore, I recommend Data Analysts to study more about this topic, considering the extent of studying they need based on the volume and sensitivity of the data.

By:
Ghaith AlBahr (Mustafa Deniz): CEO of INDICATORS

PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES’ NEEDS ASSESSMENT IN GAZIANTEP

Published on: 2019-07-01نُشِرَ بتاريخ: 2019-07-01

Reports by international bodies and organizations, indicate that the numbers of people with disabilities in Syria have risen dramatically during the conflict, with many Syrians suffering from injuries that left them with some kinds of disability. By the end of 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that there were nearly 1 million people with disabilities in Syria. That figure increased due to the war in the country, according to a report by the World Health Organization in 2017 about the needs of the Syrian people that there were 2.8 million people with permanent physical disabilities, of whom 86,000 their limbs were amputated.
As the fighting continues and the Syrian areas are being bombed and destroyed, waves of displacement and asylum in neighboring countries have increased. Turkey has the largest share of the estimated 3.5 million Syrian refugees, including those with disabilities. Syrian refugees in Turkey face difficult living conditions, such as high living costs, low job opportunities, low financial returns, and complicated procedures for extracting official documents such as temporary protection cards and work permits. Living conditions are particularly difficult for people with disabilities as society has low confidence in them and their capacity and poor funding from international donors to launch projects that seek to meet their needs and support them psychologically, healthily, and professionally.
Research objectives
The report aims to study the situation of people with disabilities residing in the Turkish city of Gaziantep to know their living conditions, their ability to integrate into society, and opportunities available to them in terms of work, education, capacity-building training, and health needs. Also, identify the most significant difficulties they are experiencing and to direct humanitarian support in a way that meets their requirements.
Research methodology
The data collection took place in July 2019 and included 1,337 people with disabilities living in the Turkish city of Gaziantep. A field survey for people with disabilities was conducted based on Sanad’s database. The interviews were carried out using a questionnaire with closed and half-open questions.

PESTEL tool

Published on: 2020-04-21نُشِرَ بتاريخ: 2020-04-21

By:

Ghaith Albahr: CEO of INDICATORS Company

Reem Barakat: Research Coordinator in INDICATORS

What are the external factors that affect the success or the failure of startups?
Business sector is a very complex, anything happens in the country affects it, directly or indirectly as well as the internal factors that affect companies such as the employees and the required logistics, and the external factors such as competitors, customers, and suppliers…etc, there are bigger and more dangerous factors, if not taken into account, these factors are generally centered around the surrounding regional environment such as the economic downturn, the changing climate of some countries, the political circumstances, society targeted by the company, and several other factors that must be taken into consideration.

When proposing a new project idea it cannot be adopted only because it is unique, for example according to Wikipedia KitKat company offered 300 different flavors of chocolate bars in Japan since 2000 to test and release new products in Japanese market, taking advantage of the low of fees on primary products, this helped in the company success and achieve more sales in Japan from 2012 to 2014, due to the fact that generally known about Japanese people love green tea, this made KitKat launch a chocolate bar with green tea flavor in 2004, even it changed the cover of this chocolate to green color, while it is in all other countries where offered in red cover, KitKat depended on the research of society norms and traditions, that why it went to this big change in Japan and which was one of the most important factors that helped the company make huge profit.

As well as the example of KitKat, many companies try to enter the market without taking into account these external and regional factors which caused its failure.

What are the external and regional factors that must be considered for your new business?
As we’ve see in KitKat example it is necessary to pay attention of many regional factors, in order to test these factors correctly without neglecting any of sensitive aspects it’s recommended to use PESTEL tool which is considered one of the idea validation tools, this tool helps to know the circumstances and the general factors that surrounding the company and their impact on it. PESTEL focuses on six main factors that neglecting them may cause the company failure or loss of money and time, for example, if we are seeking to establish a construction company that costs millions of dollars which will be in a country where the market in need of the services of such company, but in terms of political and economic conditions, it has been found that the continuous depreciation of the currency of the country has a high likelihood to cause the company failure, if several million dollars are invested in the company and the money transferred to the local currency and the value of currency decreased to the half over three years this means that if the company gain 100% profit actually it will just be reached to zero point comparing to the value of the capital in dollars.

In order to have integrated analysis of the regional factors affecting the company, PESTEL tool focuses on the following six factors:

  • POLITICAL: which means studying the country political stability in its relations with neighboring countries and other countries, and how that affects the company we want to establish, such as political boycotts that occur between countries that negatively affect import and export, and tax policy that the state provides for foreign companies or goods imported from certain countries, I.e. the economic war launched by America against China, in this period it’s not recommended for a US company to start a business that highly dependent on Chinese electronic parts because double the taxes will cause the business failure because of the high prices of their products, which leads to their inability to compete.

  • ECONOMIC: Which means knowing whether the country is in economic recession or growth, the stability of the local currency, what is the situation of country credit rating, the extent of confidence in the products it exports, and everything related to the economic aspects of the country with focusing especially on the factors that affect our company, in the example that we’ve mentioned before, we’ve seen how the decrease in the value of the currency cause the company to lose all of the profit despite the fact that all indicators related to the demand for the construction services were positive.

  • SOCIAL: all about social customs and traditions, the composition of the society, religions and intellectual currents…etc. Let’s say that the company works in Middle East in the field of food products, when trying to enter the Japanese market, it launched products similar to the ones it offers in the Middle East market and faced low sales and huge losses even though the same products were successful in the Middle East, so when returning to the reasons it found that the company was offering products of family sizes which is too big for the Japanese family, while in the Middle East the family consists of an average of six, while the Japanese family consists of a maximum of three.

  • TECHNOLOGICAL: It is all related to the technological infrastructure in the country that affects our business which its negligence could be the reason for its failure, especially if it depends in a large part of its work on that. I.e. before YouTube, several companies tried to launch sites of video watching but they failed because the Internet was at that time still on Dial-Up system which did not help to attract people to watch videos because it takes too long to be loaded, as for YouTube succeed because it was established with the beginning of the DSL internet, which was the most important factor for its success.

  • ENVIRONMENTAL: everything related to the environmental conditions in the country, regulations related to the environment and environmental licenses, which have a direct impact on the company in this aspect. I.e. it was noticed that many investors who moved from countries that did not require complex environmental licenses and established factories in other countries immediately started planning for work with maximum capacity and built financial plans on their expectations to start production directly they were shocked that these countries did not allow them to operate except for a limited capacity for factory waste and exhaust tests to obtain the environmental licenses and operate the factory with full capacity, some factories required at least six months to obtain the environmental licenses and that led to huge losses that started from contracts that were concluded with customers and were not fulfilled and employment of workers that should work with full capacity, in addition to mistakes in the financial calculations.

  • LEGAL: it means the regulations stipulated by the state related to employment regulations, consumer protection, ownership, health, education and the conditions that the state sets in general for the establishment of any company, neglecting the regulations will cause the company’s failure as if the company establishes the project without paying attention to the legal conditions related to employment and calculates the cost of the product and the pricing neglecting the costs related to employment, which leads to mistakes in pricing and the company’s loss.

How do I make the best use of PESTEL?
Mostly, PESTEL analysis implemented through workshops in which investors and people who participate in the establishment of the company, in addition to experts and specialists in several fields, the most important of which is the company’s field of work itself and specialists in economics and law, and the other fields that related to PESTEL analysis. The depth of the analysis, discussions and the number of workshops that needed depend on the business size and complexity.

To benefit more from PESTEL analysis, it is recommended to look at the risks that this analysis reveals as opportunities, as it can be turned into opportunities by building procedures or bringing about changes in the project idea so that it is able to deal with those risks or use them as a market entry. In other words, if it shows from the results of PESTEL analysis that there is a big risk that the company may face in an aspect it is not necessary to consider the business idea a failure or cancel it, but rather to think about how to develop the business idea in order to exceed this risk, make it as a competitive advantage and increase the opportunities of the success of our business.

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Published on: 2021-10-28نُشِرَ بتاريخ: 2021-10-28

By:
Ghaith Albahr: CEO of INDICATORS
Anas Attar Sabbagh: Research officer in INDICATORS

Product Development Strategies:
Product development strategy refers to the methods and procedures used to present new products to the market or to modify existing products to create new businesses.

Product Development Stages:

1. Identifying opportunities (the emptiness that the product will fill)
2. The stage of creating new ideas
3. Idea’s assessment stage
4. Studying the new product in terms of cost and quality
5. Testing the developed product
6. The stage of introducing the developed product to the market
7. Post-marketing evaluation stage

The Importance of Product Development
Product development is one of the important marketing activities during the life cycle of the product and the activity of the establishment as a whole, as this process represents the stage of innovating, creating, and presenting all that is new, on the basis that the consumer expects the establishment to provide him with the best in terms of quality and efficacy at the convenient price and at the convenient time and place.
The following chart shows the percentage of the expenditures spent by (APPLE)
Co. on research and development in relation to the total revenues

yus-1

Product Development Data Sources
1. Customer needs analysis
2. Customer behavior analysis
3. Competitor analysis
4. Customer feedback analysis
5. Studying customer satisfaction
6. Testing customer experience
7. Compared to other experiences
8. Analyzing competitor products and alternative products

Product Development tools
1. Innovation
2. The new product must be eco-friendly
3. Manufacturability
4. Improving maintainability
5. Reducing complexity and increasing modularity
6. Increasing efficacy and durability
7. Reducing production costs

Product Development Risks
1. Takes a long time
2. The product development process is expensive
3. Strict legal requirements
4. Failure in estimating results

PSEA

Published on: 2022-01-17نُشِرَ بتاريخ: 2022-01-17

Given the severity of the IDPs in Syria being subjected to sexual or financial exploitation, we conducted a study in this regard, as we shed light on:

Showing the percentage of people who were subjected to exploitation and abuse by some humanitarian or relief sectors.
The reasons that made the victims of such abuses refrain from filing complaints.
The type and form of the abuse or exploitation they were subjected to
Their extent of their knowledge about how to get help and support in case they are subjected to such abuses.

Rubbish data

Published on: 2022-05-23نُشِرَ بتاريخ: 2022-05-23

Through my experience of working with many organizations, research centers, and academic researchers, I have noticed an issue in the collected data that only can be named as rubbish data or useless data.

The idea of useless data can be summarized as data or questions asked in questionnaires that are not useful in anything related to the objectives of the research, for example in many monitoring or evaluation activities, questions are asked in beneficiary interviews about the family structure in detail, such as asking about the family members disaggregated by gender and age groups. Some may think that these data are important, but experience says the opposite, as these data are important in the phase of needs assessment and selection of beneficiaries, which were already collected in the previous activities, and all the cases I witnessed did not use this data (in the course of writing a monitoring or evaluation report), and in the best case, the family members data were grouped into a final number, so why were all these details asked and make the beneficiaries exhausted with all these questions?

The belief of some researchers that if these data are not useful, it will not cause any issues is wrong, as a large number of questions and asking questions that have nothing to do with the research objectives causes several problems, including an increase in costs, an increase in the participants’ hesitation and fear due to a large number of details that are asked about and the lack of Its rationality, the decrease in the participants’ interest in providing serious answers due to the increase in the duration of the interview and their fatigue, an increase in the possibility of errors in data collection, an increase in the complexities of data analysis, distracting the researcher from the processing data and writing the report and thus discussing topics that not related to the objectives of the research and distracting the decision-makers.

The observed cases that may be called rubbish data are uncountable. Asking about the name of the participant in a political poll in which the name of the participant does not matter at all, it only expresses his legal personality as a representative of a sample of the surveyed community groups (except in rare cases related to verification and follow-up of the data collection teams), asking about the participant’s name will necessarily lead to providing answers that stray more from his true opinions, as a result of his fear of linking those answers to his name and exposing him to any harm. I always advise that the questions we ask to be linked to the objectives of our research and not to say, “We wouldn’t lose anything if we ask this question.”

By:
Ghaith Albahr: CEO of INDICATORS

SUSPENDED WOMEN

Published on: 2020-04-01نُشِرَ بتاريخ: 2020-04-01

Objectives:
The study aims to research the situation of divorced women residing in Turkey and to determine the legal options available to them to register their marriage contracts or divorce cases at the official authorities in both Syria and Turkey, and to reveal the most important difficulties and challenges facing them on the various aspects such as social, financial and legal aspects

Research type: Divorced women

Publish date: April 2020

Publisher: INDICATORS Center

SYRIANS EMPLOYMENT VIA INTERNET

Published on: 2018-04-01نُشِرَ بتاريخ: 2018-04-01

Online working doesn’t need the working to stay in the same place, which is make it suitable for Syrian situation, while Syrians can work wherever they move, they only need an internet connection and a computer to continue their work.
Another benefit comes from the income, which it will be in foreign currency, that means higher income comparing to the low prices of Syrian pound. This also brings money to the local market which increases its movement.

Brief of the assessment:
Objectives: This assessment is trying to increase the opportunities of Syrians online working, by screening the available competencies that suitable for such business, and discovering the projects that can be most effective and helpful for them to start working via internet, then share them with the NGOs that interested Syrian employment.

Main themes:

  1. Syrian competencies for online working.
  2. Description of the situation of current Syrian online workers.
  3. Barriers and challenges of online working, especially for Syrians.
  4. Expectations of growth for online working in Syria.
  5. Recommended projects to prepare Syrians for online working.

Scope:
The assessment will cover 3 governorates: Idleb, Daraa, and Aleppo.
Will be conducted in January/2018.

Target groups:
The questions concentrate on Syrian youth, females, and people with disability.

Data sources:

  1. Syrian individuals: to screen the competencies they have for online working, their awareness about it, and the equipment they have for such business.
  2. Syrian online workers: to provide full stories about some online workers, how they started their work, their monthly salaries, the challenges that face them, their needs to improve their business…
  3. Online working consultants: to have in depth information about online working, what they recommend for Syrian situation, what they recommend to deal with the challenges of Syrians online working, what kind of trainings Syrians need to be able to start working online…
  4. Secondary data: to review any research have been done about online working, what are the most demanded services, how online working platforms working, how to manage money transfers…