No more ‘soft’ science: Quantitative evaluation of collaboration effectiveness

Researchers and evaluators are often asked to give quantitative measures on topics that do not easily lend themselves to such measurement. Collaboration is one such topic: it is acknowledged to be a critical success factor for all kinds of organizations, but research and evaluation often lags because of the difficulty of measurement. This tutorial will introduce a range of quantitative methods for evaluating collaboration, on three levels: group-level experiments, micro-level measures (individuals), and macro-level measures (organizations.) I will walk participants through the methods where I have the most experience, and also mention a number of other methods, some very new, which may become increasingly valuable.