Why Organizations Alleviating Poverty Struggle to Measure Their Effectiveness

Stories From the Field

Why Organizations Alleviating Poverty Struggle to Measure Their Effectiveness

To make the Measuring Mobility toolkit, Stanford SPARQ and the Urban Institute began with getting a deeper understanding of the challenges experienced by practitioners trying to assess their programs. The teams spoke with research directors, academics, and evaluators. Those conversations revealed four major frustrations that the Measuring Mobility toolkit aims to fix:

Frustration: Measurements are highly valuable, but they cost a lot to do right and get deprioritized or improvisationally executed in the face of limited resources or competing concerns.

Fix: The Measuring Mobility toolkit gathers and organizes numerous psychological and economic assessments that are based on rigorous research. They provide an accessible, free, and robust way for practitioners to employ measurements that matter most to leaving poverty behind.

Frustration: It’s hard to know what should be measured.

Fix: Each of the toolkit’s measurements includes explanations of why it matters to poverty alleviation, what it assesses, the people it is best suited for, and how to use it. Practitioners who want to dive deeper into the research can find links to original studies and 10 explainers about the terminology and scientific methods related to the toolkit.

Frustration: Practitioners and evaluators are searching for a trusted expert’s opinion on choosing the most appropriate and effective measurements.

Fix: Stanford University’s psychology department is a leader among its peers, and SPARQ’s team members collectively have more than 100 years of research experience. SPARQ’s directors, Jennifer Eberhardt and Hazel Markus, have made major contributions to the field, from Markus’ work on cultural psychology to Eberhardt’s investigations of implicit bias, race, and the American criminal justice system. The Urban Institute brings deep expertise and experience with measuring poverty and economic success. Together, the teams provide a holistic and trustworthy approach to assessing upward mobility.

Frustration: There’s no easy way to search through the array of measurements that are available, and many of them are locked up in academic journals.

Fix: The Measuring Mobility toolkit pulls science out of journals and distills it to the most relevant points while providing organizational, search, and filtration tools. Practitioners can explore the measurements by three major types — Power and Autonomy, Being Valued in Community, and Economic Success — or filter them by age, duration, and reading level. Or if they know exactly what they want, they can search by term, such as “inclusion.”

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