Quantitative information plays an important role in humanitarian analysis. Indeed, humanitarian information systems have built substantive standards and procedures and have invested significantly in cultivating analyst skill in collecting, analyzing and integrating quantitative data into acute food insecurity and other humanitarian analyses, while also developing robust measures to cross-check its validity, reliability and representativeness.
However, qualitative information also plays an important role in the analyses that feed into humanitarian information systems. Collecting and considering such evidence can be at least as systematic as methods used for representative quantitative data. But guidance for gathering, analyzing, cross-checking and integrating this broader range of evidence into analyses that support humanitarian decision-making continues to lag, hampering the effective functioning of an important facet of the humanitarian response infrastructure.
This paper highlights the role of qualitative data, proposing approaches for addressing the real and perceived challenges of gathering and analyzing data using qualitative methods with the objective of sparking demand for the development of a more structured and standardized means of integrating these methods into humanitarian analyses to support more holistic, accurate, effective and impactful humanitarian responses.
Read the full paper, originally published in the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, here.
