Qualitative indicators
Definition: Qualitative indicators are measures that describe or assess the quality of certain aspects or characteristics, often based on subjective assessment. They often answer questions like "what kind?", "why?", or "how?".
Examples:
- Level of satisfaction among participants
- Perception of community safety
- Quality of teaching in a school
- Attitudes towards a new policy
You can create a qualitative indicator from the logframe module.
Qualitative indicators (or questions) are often used in opinion surveys. The following example uses a 5 point Likert scale:
In the above example, you would be able to count the % of satisfied customers (who picked "good" or "excellent").
An other common example is for hard to quantify dimensions such as organizational capacity. The following example is to assess the leadership of organisations involved in community-based health care:
| 1 | Null | Health leadership is provided by health professionals, without community involvement. |
| 2 | Low | The health committee doesn't function, but the local health officer works independently of interest groups. |
| 3 | Moderate | The health committee operates under the direction of an independent local health official. |
| 4 | Good | The health committee is active and takes initiatives. |
| 5 | Excellent | The health committee represents all the diversity of interests in the community, and controls oversees the activities of the local health officer. |
In all cases, qualitative indicators are often attributed numerical values to be more easily communicated, like when organizations report on the rate of beneficiaries satisfied with a service delivery (% of people who selected 4 or 5 on a likert scale), or that people are on average satisfied because the aggregated average value of all answers are +4.0. Qualitative indicators can add a lot of contextual information to quantitative indicators. There are however multiple considerations to take into account when designing an appropriate qualitative indicator. Make sure to discuss them with your M&E team before starting to collect data!
Tooltip
Radar charts are particularly useful to present multiple and related qualitative indicators
You can create a qualitative indicator from the logframe module.
Qualitative “scale” indicator
Example: level of appreciation of your project
Qualitative “event” or “deliverable” indicator
Example: the guide is published
Here the "events" or steps before completion are given equal weights of "20" from 0 to 100, meaning in this case that for the guide to be published it requires to go through 5 steps of estimated equal effort and/or importance. If aggregated the average value of this indicator will provide a numerical hint of the overall completion rate of all guides published.
If you wish to enter disaggregated target values, refer to: Enter disaggregated target values
Note
With qualitative indicators, it is not possible to have two different elements in the scale with the same numerical value.