ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Oxfam's use of interpretive research to deepen the findings of project evaluations based on the use of quantitative survey methods. It describes two pilot studies of this kind. The first aims to understand the success of a community-based disaster risk management project in Pakistan; the second traces the multiple impacts at household level of a smallholder irrigation scheme in Zimbabwe. These studies employ different qualitative and participatory research methods to tease out local understandings and explanations of project impacts. In both cases, the rich information that this interpretive and ethnographic research generated was then used to interpret the quantitative findings of existing evaluations in order to generate programme insights and lessons for development practice. The chapter highlights the lessons that Oxfam has learned about combining interpretive approaches to research with a quantitative model of evaluation. Quantitative data were required so that the number of indirect project beneficiaries and extent of food security impacts could be estimated.
