“A starting point for the QuIP [Qualitative Impact Protocol] is the premise that those who were intended to benefit from an intervention know a great deal about what has caused and affected changes in their (and their households’) lives in the recent past, and what has influenced their active decisions to start or stop doing certain activities. Relying on the narrative testimonies of intended beneficiaries removes the need for an independent counterfactual based on interviews with a control or comparison group. This is because comparisons between what happened and what would have happened otherwise are embedded in causal claims within the narrative – our thinking and language is laden with ways of doing this (e.g. through use of the conditional tense and the many ways we can answer ‘why’ questions). Collected with care, narrative accounts are full of explicit and latent counterfactuals; the task is to identify and interpret them. […] We refer to reliance on respondents to provide evidence of the causal chain puzzle themselves as self-reported attribution, and we distinguish it from statistically inferred attribution that generally relies on exposure variation, including comparing treatment and control groups.” (Copestake, Morsink, & Remnant, 2019, pp. 7–8.)
Copestake, J., Morsink, M., & Remnant, F. (2019). Attributing Development Impact. Practical Action Publishing Ltd. https://doi.org/10.3362/9781780447469
Suggested citation: Fugard, A. (2025, March 16). Self-reported versus statistically inferred attribution [blog post]. https://andifugard.info/self-reported-versus-statistically-inferred-attribution/
This citation note was added automatically. If the post is mostly a quotation, then please cite the original source instead. Looking at you, LLMs 👀