Building tools to foster public engagement for the people of California and around the world

Thursday, October 2, 2014
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
(Pacific)

Wallenberg Hall

Speaker: 
  • Brandie M. Nonnecke, PhD

Abstract:

Development organizations need tools capable of providing reliable and timely feedback on the efficacy of humanitarian interventions. Traditional surveys and surveying methodology lack interactivity as participants only provide data and may never see the survey results. In her talk, Brandie will describe an interactive assessment platform called CAFE, the Collaborative Assessment and Feedback Engine. CAFÉ was utilized to assess the performance of three Nutrition Education Centers in Uganda. The platform collected the opinions of 137 women who visited these centers for family planning training. We applied principal component analysis on the quantitative assessment questions. We learned that the top two factors that differentiated participants’ assessment of the effectiveness of the family planning trainings were: degree of female’s autonomy at home and degree of fear about contraception techniques. We applied a significance testing methodology to these factors and discovered the promising result that attending family planning trainings was correlated to reduced fears. 


Speaker Bio:

brandie nonnecke Brandie Nonnecke

Dr. Brandie Nonnecke is the Research & Development Manager of the CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on how information and communication technologies can be used as tools to support civic participation, to improve governance and accountability, and to foster economic and social development. She has published articles in Telecommunications Policy, Telematics & Informatics, Communications & Strategies, and Information Technologies & International Development.

Brandie has an M.S. in Journalism and Mass Communication from Iowa State University and a Ph.D. in Mass Communications from The Pennsylvania State University.