ALC Mid-Generation Review Paper No. 2
Damilola Adegoke, Ph.D.
Peter da Costa Postdoctoral Research Associate and Head of Data Lab,
African Leadership Centre,
King’s College London
Email: damilola.adegoke@kcl.ac.uk
This study adopts a social sequence analysis for understanding the life trajectories of fellows’ experiences five (5) years before and after participating in the different fellowships of the African Leadership Centre, King’s College London. It allows a retrospective and prospective sequential life trajectory study approach with transversal and longitudinal capabilities for examining alumni career pathways and emergent characteristics over the years. This approach helps to ascertain the effectiveness of programs’ founding objectives, although they are difficult to determine because, frequently, evaluations are cross-sectional with special emphasis on the contributions of the fellows after the program, leaving out the significant insights that the individual and other extenuating characteristic features contributed to the observed outcome effectiveness. Since each cohort is different, this approach gives room for cross-sectional analyses to help understand peculiarities and nuances of the trajectories of the different cohorts.
The metric instrument must confidently aspire to be transparent, replicable, objective, and introspective. It is not enough to simply ask alumni if they have been impacted or not; the impact must be concrete and demonstrable to an observable extent. Therefore, the choice of a longitudinal life trajectory sequence analysis and the development of a system for continuous tracking of the programs and alumni performances, across different timescales – monthly, quarterly, yearly, and every five years before the commencement and after the conclusion of the fellowship.
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