Claudia Nicholson, Senior Research and Evaluation Associate
Claudia Nicholson
Senior Research and Evaluation Associate / TDCMs. Claudia Nicholson is a Grenadian Economist with 20 years extensive experience in using econometric and statistical techniques to evaluate national policies, projects, and programs for vulnerable populations in North America. Over the past 20 years she has conducted evaluation projects in the US, Canada, and Grenada. Ms. Nicholson has the unique experience of working on pioneering policy research techniques in the US and Canada, with two well renown and award winning social policy research organisations Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation; Social Research and Demonstration Corporation) that use randomized control trials (i.e., RCT) to evaluate government social policies.
For 16 of those 20 years, she was a core member of the research team that designed, implemented, and evaluated Canada’s four largest social research demonstration RCT projects. These and many of her other projects are grounded in economic theory and thus required the use of econometric analyses to assess. Further more, participating in this pioneering work involved the use of some of the most rigorous quantitative data collection and experimental econometric analyses, considered by some economists as the gold standard in social research. These were used to calculate outcomes and impacts and in combination with qualitative research results to determine which policies and programs work (or did not work), for whom, and why, as well as the direct and indirect costs and benefits to beneficiaries, different levels of government, and society.
Her main responsibilities included that of data manager and analyst/econometrician. As data manager Ms. Nicholson led the design of the projects’ data collection efforts, determining relevant socio-economic indicators, how to calculate them, and the best available data for doing so. Ms. Nicholson also developed the corporate policies, procedures, and guidelines for data collection, documentation, processing, analysis, dissemination, and archiving for the Social Research and Demonstration Corporation (SRDC), which is still being used by the company. As an analyst, Ms. Nicholson has utilized econometric techniques such as univariate and multivariate least squares regression analysis. For example, multivariate adjusted regression models to bring greater precision to estimates of program outcome, impact, and cost-benefit, by taking advantage of socio-economic information. To name a few, her use of hypothesis tests includes F-tests, t-tests, and chi-squared tests and she has completed many descriptive statistical analysis, and inferential statistics using probabilistic sampling allowing generalization to an overall population.
Ms. Nicholson has authored or co-authored numerous evaluation reports based on her analyses of quantitative socio-economic data and results from qualitative data. Many of these reports are listed on her attached CV and several are available at SRDC.