I would like to present to you a concept called “Parsing of Indicators”. The concept of parsing something is not new. What is new in this document is the application of the process of parsing to indicators. For the benefit of those who have not come across parsing of anything in the past, I will first explain what is parsing, especially in grammar. In grammar, “parsing” is the process of analyzing a word and the role it plays in a given sentence. Let us take a sentence for example – A cat killed the rat. Now if we have to parse the word “killed” in the given sentence, we would say firstly that it is a verb. Further a verb has a tense, voice, mood, person and number – so many things. You don’t believe me? Let me break it down for you. We can use the verb “killed” in the above sentence in so many ways and get different meanings. e.g.:
Tense: Present Perfect Tense Voice: Active Voice Mood: Indicative Mood Person: Third Person Number: Singular Number This is parsing. Even a whole sentence can be parsed. We can parse a sentence and identify the subject, predicate, object, verb, other parts of speech, etc. Even for the nouns and pronouns, we can identify Case, Gender and Number. Likewise, parsing an indicator will be an interesting and useful exercise. If an indicator is properly parsed, it can tell us the data needs, analysis plan and give some hints about the measurement and reporting method for an indicator. Many organisations and projects are often faced with challenges in measuring indicators and determining their status. While not knowing appropriate methodology or lacking expertise in data analysis could be popular reasons, not understanding the data needs is more often a bigger challenge. If an indicator is not understood well, neither can the data collection be planned, nor can data be analysed uniformly. Different people might just end up with different results extracted from the same data set. Let us see, how an indicator can be parsed. The first step is to identify the various parts or components of an indicator. Before we try that, let us look at some examples of indicators
These are various different types of indicators – Proportions, Means, Rates, Ratios and Indices. Here we will be more interested in proportions and numbers which are like the M&E lifeblood for most development organisations. For that purpose, let us look at the first three indicators above and a few more.
If we closely observe these indicators, they have something in common, especially in terms of their structure or syntax. 1st Part: The type of measure – Proportion or Number 2nd Part: The word “of” 3rd Part: A particular group of people (or non-personal entity) 4th Part: A verb of doing or being 5th Part: A situation/status/criteria/standard If we can divide each indicator based on these five parts and place them in a table, it will look like below: It is one thing to parse an indicator in the above manner and identify its various parts or components. But what we can do with such parsing, is of greater significance. For that, we will see, what each of the above five parts of an indicator mean and what they imply.
The criteria or standard in an indicator describes what would qualify a person to be counted for that indicator. In the case of proportion indicators, describes what would qualify a person in being counted for the numerator. To close with, let us look at the parsing of a few indicators, the grammar way… Try doing this with other indicators...
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AuthorProttoy Kumar Das Archives
December 2016
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