ABSTRACT
In our technology-driven age, the digital revolution has ushered in an era of unprecedented data generation that is shaping the landscape of program evaluation. The term “big data” encapsulates this wealth of structured and unstructured information, revolutionizing how we understand the world. However, the accessibility of vast amounts of information poses challenges, leading to information overload and diminished evaluation quality. To address this, emerging technologies, particularly data analytics, offer new opportunities for evaluators. This chapter introduces quantitative text analysis as a tool for navigating big data in program evaluation, highlighting its potential to extract and analyze policy preferences from large documents, bridging the gap between information abundance and cognitive limitations in the evaluation process.
