You are required to submit a preliminary “methodology memo” of 2-3 pages in length that identifies your evaluation criteria and policy alternatives. If relevant, you should discuss the social, ecological, or political issues that should also be considered (e.g. are certain people incurring greater costs than others; how does the political landscape affect your analysis, is there an equitable distribution of benefits). You will need to describe the general types of variables that might measure your chosen evaluative criteria and then state your proposed methodological path. In light of this course’s focus, I am requiring that you conduct an ex-ante analysis and that you utilize economic approaches; however, you may have also employed additional analytic methods (impact, political, ethical analyses). These will need to be sketched out here.
Comment:
The methodology memo is the second assignment in completion of your final policy analysis report. This memo builds off the problem memo to detail the research design (evaluation criteria, analytic models, information sources, etc..) that you will use to evaluate chosen policy alternatives’ ability to address the problem you identified in your problem memo.