Executive Summary

Introduction

The success of the CARERE2 project depends on the ability of officials of the Cambodian government, notably at provincial, district and commune levels, to administer rural development activities and to understand and perform their development duties with a proper degree of professional competence. To achieve its objectives, CARERE2 had the Cambodian Institute of Human Rights (CIHR) implement training in the skills of Management and Good Governance. The training was designed to assure that government officials involved in the SEILA program would become more familiar with attitudes and behavior such as impartiality, openness, accountability and the idea of public service, thereby improving their performance in rural development administration.

The Center for Advanced Study (CAS) was contracted to conduct an evaluation to assess the impact of the training on the participants and to assess the effectiveness of CIHR’s training in the principles of Management and Good Governance. The evaluation was intended to assess the impact of the training on the participants’ knowledge, attitudes and performance in their work. The evaluation had two aspects. A survey was administered to a sample of trainees and analyzed using a quantitative methodology. In addition, depth interviews were conducted with key trainee informants and analyzed using a qualitative approach.

The portion of the survey that covers curriculum materials reveals the overall impact of CIHR training on the knowledge of SEILA trainees and the variation in impact among sub-groups of trainees. The portion of the survey that covers governance and development issues apart from the curriculum materials suggests some areas where further training is needed to diminish authoritarian attitudes and promote democracy and human rights.

Our interviews reveal the impact of CIHR training on the attitudes of officials, mainly toward one another. The training was a shared activity among high and low level officials providing them an occasion to discuss management improvements in leadership style, consultation and decision making in the workplace.

The challenge that remains is to assess the degree to which the trainees actually put their enhanced knowledge of good governance into practice in dealing with the public. A question that remains to be answered is the degree to which officials extend democratic management concepts from their government workplace to their relations with villagers. That assessment would involve a survey directed at people outside government to elicit their views about the conduct of the officials who govern them. Such an assessment was beyond the scope of this study.

Part One. Quantitative Approach

Our analysis assesses the impact of the training on knowledge and the retention of curriculum materials by the trainees. The analysis includes comparisons with an untrained control group and comparisons within the trained group along the dimensions of level in the SEILA structure and SEILA province.

Our recommendations indicate areas of understanding within the broad categories of Management and Good Governance where training might usefully be focussed in the future. Our recommendations also suggest the kind of needs assessment that might make such Good Governance training more relevant to the specific challenges presented by this target audience.

Survey Methodology

A stratified cluster sample design was used to survey trainees in the SEILA provinces. A Control sample, without training and from a non-SEILA province was also included in the survey. The sampling of trainees followed a method of obtaining representative quota samples constructed to reflect the composition of the trainee population, using categories of province and level of service in the SEILA structure. A sample of trainees, N=355, was surveyed out of a trainee population of 2178.

Study Analysis

The data from the survey was entered into a SPSS database. We compared mean scores, by curriculum area, for our respondents using analysis of variance (ANOVA) and post hoc tests in the General Linear Model procedure of SPSS that makes multiple comparisons between subgroups and indicates the significance of these observations.

It is conventional to report significance in the form of a probability, “p,” that an association observed could have been produced merely by sampling error. It is conventional to report statistical significance at three levels of “p,” p £.05, p£.01 and p£.001. Statistical significance is often put another way. We could say that if p£.05 then we have 95% confidence that our findings of association could not be due to sampling error or random effect.

Survey Findings

SEILA viewed as a whole:

In four curriculum areas we note from ANOVA charts generated by SPSS that statistically significant differences between trainees and control are as follows:

Good Governance (p£.01)

Moral Governance (p£.01)

Democracy and Elections (p£.05)

Constitution and Rule of Law (p£.01)

In these four areas we can say that CIHR training had a significant impact on the trainees as reflected in their test results, compared to the untrained group. Our confidence that the observed differences in mean test scores between trainees and control respondents in Good Governance, Moral Governance, and Constitution and Rule of Law is not due to sampling errors is 99%. Our confidence for Democracy and Elections is 95%. The differences in the other curriculum areas are not statistically significant at the .05 level.

SEILA trainees viewed by level in the SEILA structure:

There are highly significant differences by SEILA level in two subject areas:

Moral Governance (p£.001)

Constitution and Rule of Law (p£.001)

In the Moral Governance curriculum area the differences in mean scores between the following levels are significant at the .05 level:

Province and Commune

Province and Village

District and Village.

In the Constitution and Rule of Law curriculum area the differences in mean scores between the following levels are significant at the .05 level:

Province and Village

District and Village.

The other differences in scores for SEILA level subgroups are not statistically significant.

These findings suggest a gap between Province and District on one hand and Village and Commune on the other hand. Lacking a pre test of knowledge before the training for each level, we cannot say whether these differences are due to a different curriculum presented differently to upper and lower levels of SEILA participants in these areas, or to inherently different training challenges presented by the two levels of SEILA officials.

The SEILA trainees viewed by SEILA Province:

The figures produced by SPSS calculations show that there are three statistically significant differences by province. In the subject area

Human Rights and Buddhism

one subgroup comparison is identified as significant at the .05 level,

Banteay Meanchey and Siem Reap

The other two curriculum areas that show statistically significant differences by province are

Constitution and Rule of Law (p£.001)

Peaceful Conflict Resolution (p£.05)

For the curriculum area Constitution and Rule of Law the following province comparisons of means are significant at the .05 level,

Banteay Meanchey and Siem Reap

Battambang and Pursat and Siem Reap.

Banteay Meanchey shows a particular need for reinforcement in the areas of Human Rights and Buddhism, and Constitution and Rule of Law.

Siem Reap shows a particular need for reinforcement in the Conflict Resolution curriculum area.

Battambang shows a need for reinforcement in Democracy and Elections and Constitution and Rule of Law subject areas.

Pursat shows consistently high performance over all the subject areas.

Conclusions

The significance of these data on an assessment of the impact of CIHR training is that the impact varies significantly according to level and province in SEILA. CIHR should conduct a careful needs assessment before the training to reveal what levels of trainees required more work in specific curriculum areas, to bring their scores up to a satisfactory level. CIHR should fine-tune their curriculum to focus on the special needs of provinces that show particularly poor scores in a particular curriculum area.

The practice of providing the same training for all trainees is guaranteed to depress the overall measurable impact of the training. A curriculum focussed on target provinces with more intense training in particular subject areas where weakness exists would be likely to raise mean scores among these poor performers and thereby raise the mean scores of the trainees as a whole.

General Recommendations

The special needs of the relatively less educated, rural based authorities at commune and village level suggests that an appropriately modified curriculum presentation should be utilized for these groups.

The particularly high averages achieved by respondents in the “People” category, who consisted typically of aacaa, suggests that selected individuals from this group might be likely candidates for capacity building as master trainers and instructors in future efforts, especially for CIHR training at the rural level

The Pursat trainee group would be a likely place to look for instructors who have broad and high level knowledge of the curriculum and who might be given training to train their fellow SEILA officials from other provinces.

The exercise we have carried out in this study can serve as a model for the kind of assessment CIHR should conduct as a “pre-test” before training to determine how they should refine their curriculum delivery to be most effective.

Specific Recommendations

Management

These data suggest the finding that a large proportion of SEILA trainees view their leadership and management responsibilities to include an elevated concern for the welfare of and close ties among colleagues in government, within the context of a common political orientation. The similarity of the responses of SEILA trainees and the Control group suggests that the CIHR training did not have any impact on these attitudes. CIHR curriculum development should consider how the principles of public service can be fostered in a target audience with views like those revealed by our findings.

Good Governance

The pattern of these responses suggests that there is a sizeable group, around a quarter of the trainees who maintain characteristically authoritarian attitudes toward leadership. The differences between the SEILA group and the Control indicate the impact of some training in this area. However, we are unable to distinguish the effects of SEILA training and CIHR training. If CIHR performed a “pre-test” before their training and a thorough assessment after their training effort they would be able to demonstrate the impact of their training.

Human Rights

The curriculum area Human Rights and Buddhism is one in which the mean score of CIHR trainees was lower than the mean score of the control group. This finding suggests that some serious rethinking of the curriculum area should be undertaken.

The association of Human Rights and Buddhism in this curriculum area assumes that the target audience is knowledgeable about, and committed to, the moral and philosophical principles of Buddhism. That approach should be based on a survey assessment of the attitudes toward Buddhist principles among local authorities. Lacking such an assessment, we can only observe that our data indicates an extremely large percentage of these officials joined the government during a Communist regime that was hostile to Buddhism.

A more appropriate approach to this particular target audience would be to link the human rights curriculum area to principles of the rule of law taught in the Constitution and Rule of Law curriculum area, where our findings show that CIHR training has significant impact on trainees.

Democracy and Elections

In order for CIHR to design a curriculum that is relevant to the apparent context of beliefs and attitudes held by the trainees, CIHR must conduct a needs assessment that probes further than presence or absence of knowledge of curriculum material. Such a needs assessment of a kind modeled here would provide the material CIHR needs to consider how specific, contemporary social issues of Cambodia, like impunity and corruption and rapid social change, can be understood and managed by trainees within a framework of democracy and rule of law. Such an approach suggests that curriculum development must be a constant process that stays in touch with the changing realities of the target audience of trainees.

A training curriculum that stresses relevance will be likely to deliver desired changes in attitudes and behavior of local officials toward the objectives of impartiality, openness, accountability and the idea of public service, within an understanding of the principles of rule of law and respect for citizen’s rights.

Constitution and Rule of Law

The CIHR should extend or reinforce its curriculum to emphasize the function of the Constitution to establish and safeguard the rights of citizens in a democracy within the rule of law. The curriculum should confront the apparently widely held notion that the Constitution was merely a political device to end civil war and an instrument to satisfy foreign donors.

CIHR should refine its materials to show the connection --in principle --of the Constitution to the establishment of a culture of rule of law. The findings of our survey suggest a persistent lack of understanding of the limitations placed on powerful persons in a democratic structure based on a Constitution and based on Rule of Law.

The CIHR curriculum should include a focus on the gap between what is actual, every day (mis-)practice in Cambodia, which can be revealed in a survey like this, and the ideals for practice under the principles of Rule of Law. The curriculum should consider how to stimulate the trainees to understand the changes that would be needed if the Rule of Law were adopted.

Development and Governance

CIHR could make its training more relevant to the actual challenges faced by SEILA development managers if the training brought into the open the dilemmas of Cambodian development imperatives and authoritarian practices and international standards of civil and political rights.

Control of Village Resources

CIHR should understand the actual perceptions and practices of its trainees in regard to control of village resources and use this knowledge to tailor its training to the specific needs of the trainees. CIHR bases much of its training on concepts of moral leadership and respect for the rule of law. Our findings indicate that the limits on the power that local authorities may exercise over villagers and village resources within the law are topics that CIHR should consider in designing relevant training for authorities at the village and commune level. Of particular importance is the widely held understanding by local level authorities that they have an exclusive right to control assembly and mobilization of citizens in their jurisdictions.

Needs Assessment

We recommend that CIHR investigate the prejudices, prevailing authoritarian practices, shortcomings in understanding of the principles of good governance among trainees in a pre-test or needs assessment, before the training. With this information CIHR can develop a curriculum to deal with specific problems that have been identified. If the undemocratic practices, which our findings show prevail, are confronted explicitly in the training, CIHR is likely to meet its objectives of having a measurable impact on the knowledge, attitudes and practices of its trainees.

If CIHR takes into consideration specific details of the operation of the top-down model of control of the population that is indicated by these survey findings, CIHR may be able to devise a curriculum that is relevant to the experience of the trainees. CIHR can then improve its curriculum by stressing the principles of good management, good governance, human rights, democracy and rule of law in relation to the concept of participatory development. In this way it will build on the considerable training and capacity building in good governance subjects provided by UNDP/CARERE for the SEILA participants. Such a curriculum can then be scaled up to serve the nation-wide needs for training in civic education and best participatory development practices that will presented by the newly formed commune councils.

Part Two: Qualitative Approach

The most striking conclusion we draw from our interviews with trainees is that, on one level, the CIHR training is providing useful lessons of Good Governance and Management and introducing practical knowledge and skills to public officials. But, on another important level this training is confronting and ameliorating the pervasive climate of fear within which public officials have been working.

The training course is a shared activity, widely known to be taking place at all levels of government. Both the explicit lessons of Human Rights and Democracy and the knowledge that these lessons are being addressed in general to government officials seems to be having the effect of reducing the levels of hostile arrogance and violence that were evidently endemic in hierarchical relations in earlier regimes. Thus our interviewees report a decrease in angry language between higher and lower ranking persons and an increase in freedom to raise ideas from lower ranking to higher ranking persons.

Overall the message of the CIHR Management training in regard to democratic decision making among officials echoes the fundamental CARERE theme of participatory development in which citizens engage with local authority on local projects for community betterment. This overlap in training of officials between CIHR and CARERE makes it difficult to discern the precise contribution CIHR training has made. However, many informants refer to a Good Governance course and the principles that were discussed during that training. It is clear that the experience of the CIHR training has made a difference in the way trainees voice their awareness of Human Rights, Good Governance in connection with Buddhism and Cambodian traditions, and, more generally, the dimension of morality in governance.

The improvement in consultation and democratic decision making among officials, and between men and women in government service, was often spoken of as a matter of Human Rights. This concept, as discussed in the CIHR training, includes mutual respect, gender sensitivity and non-violence. The relationship of Human Rights to the establishment of a culture of Rule of Law is a theme that could be reinforced in the CIHR training, as improvements evolve in the Cambodian judicial system.

Conflict resolution is mentioned as a key function in the governance duties (as distinct from the development duties) of local authorities. Many trainees note the relevance of the experience of CIHR training in Good Governance and Management in enhancing their confidence to serve as mediators in compromise settlements between citizens. This is an important area where the current CIHR module could be greatly expanded into a separate course on Alternative Dispute Resolution skills and techniques appropriate to the Cambodian context. This is especially important in view of the duties that may be mandated to the elected Commune Councils in the future.

The attitude of the authorities toward citizens’ rights to assemble without official permission is an aspect of Good Governance that deserves serious attention. It will be an important development for civil society in Cambodia when independent associations in village and commune are able to emerge. It is such associations, completely out of the control of local officials, which will be essential if lists of independent candidates are to be generated to contend in meaningful, free and fair elections at the commune level.

Many trainees recommend that the CIHR should extended its training of officials to a broader civic education of the grassroots electorate. But in this case, a central challenge would be to overcome the tendency of local authorities to perceive themselves as having the right, as local leaders, to serve as “gatekeepers” to control any assembly or mobilization of citizens in their jurisdiction.

Our interviews echo the survey findings in revealing certain fundamental authoritarian attitudes of government officials toward limiting the freedoms of the people, with which future training efforts in democracy and human rights will have to deal.

Executive Summary................................................................................................................................................ 2

Table of Contents................................................................................................................................................. 10

INTRODUCTION.......................................................................................................................................................... 11

A. Background to the Training................................................................................................................... 11

B. Background to the Evaluation............................................................................................................. 13

C. Methodology...................................................................................................................................................... 14

1. Survey Instrument Development............................................................................................................................ 14

2. Sampling.................................................................................................................................................................... 14

3. Administration of the Survey................................................................................................................................. 15

FINDINGS PART ONE: Quantitative Assessment of the Training............................................. 16

A. Performance in Curriculum Areas..................................................................................................... 16

1. Comparison of High Scores Achieved.................................................................................................................. 16

2. Comparison of Mean Scores in Curriculum Areas............................................................................................ 19

B. Performance on non-curriculum questions in the knowledge areas......................... 37

1. Management............................................................................................................................................................. 37

2. Good Governance.................................................................................................................................................... 39

3. Human Rights and Buddhism................................................................................................................................ 40

4. Democracy and Elections....................................................................................................................................... 42

5. Constitution and Rule of Law................................................................................................................................ 44

C. Performance on Non-Curriculum Questions relating Governance to Development 49

1. Freedom of Public Assembly.................................................................................................................................. 49

2. Legal and Illegal Exaction by Government Officials........................................................................................ 51

3. The Role of Civil Society in a Democracy........................................................................................................... 54

4. Democracy and Elections....................................................................................................................................... 55

FINDINGS PART TWO: Qualitative Assessments of the Training........................................... 59

Introduction............................................................................................................................................................ 59

Topic 1. Changes in one’s own attitude and behavior attributed to the training.. 61

Topic Two. Changes in the attitude and behavior of colleagues attributed to the training. 66

Topic 3. Changes in women’s attitudes and behavior due to the training.................... 74

Topic 4. Impact of the training on management style and practices............................... 80

Sub-topic 4.1. Leadership, roles and responsibilities...................................................................... 80

Sub-topic 4.2. Protest and Criticism within government and between citizens and government 84

Sub-topic 4.3. Consultation within government.............................................................................. 86

Sub-topic 4.4. Consultation between citizens and government............................................. 91

Topic 5. Impact of the training on understanding Human Rights and Rule of Law. 94

Sub-topic 5.1. Human Rights and Buddhism........................................................................................... 95

Sub-topic 5.2. Effects of Human Rights on Governance.................................................................. 97

Sub-topic 5.3. Human Rights and Law...................................................................................................... 100

Topic 6. Impact of the Training on Conflict Resolution............................................................ 102

Topic 7. Holding meetings without informing the authorities............................................ 107

Topic 8. Trainee reactions and recommendations ...................................................................... 114

Conclusions............................................................................................................................................................ 118

ANNEX.......................................................................................................................................................................... 120

Methods, Sampling and Tables of Data on Respondents.................................................................................... 121

English Version of the Questionnaire Instrument................................................................................................. 129

Evaluation of the Impact of CIHR Training

for SEILA Participants

In Principles of Management and Good Governance

William Collins, Ph.D.

Center for Advanced Study

INTRODUCTION

A. Background to the Training

The UNDP/CARERE2 Project in Northwestern Cambodia has conducted an experiment in rural development that entails fairly elaborate structures and procedures that are incorporated in the SEILA national development program. The success of the CARERE2 project depends on the ability of officials of the Cambodian government, notably at provincial, district and commune levels, to administer rural development activities and to understand and perform their development duties with a proper degree of professional competence.

To achieve its objectives, CARERE2 wished to have the Cambodian Institute of Human Rights (CIHR) implement training in the skills of Management to enable the trainees to perform their duties in an optimal way.

The UNDP/CARERE2 project also emphasizes a bottom-up approach to planning and implementation of rural development. This approach requires that government officials administering development interact with the population successfully in a participatory setting. UNDP/CARERE2 recognized that local government officials, in many cases, followed a rigid, top-down model of control of the population and were often unfamiliar with the basic concepts of participatory development.

UNDP/CARERE2 asked CIHR to implement training in Good Governance so that government officials involved in the SEILA program would become more familiar with attitudes and behavior such as impartiality, openness, accountability and the idea of public service, thereby improving their performance in rural development administration.

An associated objective for UNDP/CARERE2 was to have CIHR impart the principles of Management and Good Governance to leaders in civil society, for example those aacaa and monks active in pagoda committees. These leaders were acknowledged to have considerable unfulfilled potential to participate effectively in community development activities within the framework of the SEILA structure, which emphasizes harmonious cooperation with the authorities to assure a successful development process.

CIHR implemented a fifteen month project with support from UNDP/CARERE2 to train key SEILA participants in the principles of Management and Good Governance. A total of 2178 participants were trained, mainly government officials but also including 150 “local private sector leaders.” The training sessions were supplemented by the public dissemination of good governance messages through TV and radio presentations. These media presentations broadcast on national radio and on Battambang and Siem Reap local stations included “talk shows” on good governance themes and air “quiz” shows based on questions and answers related to the main themes of the Management and Good Governance training. These public media transmissions assured that the contents of the CIHR training were broadcast far beyond the circle of SEILA trainees.

The CIHR reported on the training that they delivered in response to the objectives of the donor in a document entitled, Principles of Management and Good Governance for SEILA Participants: Implementation Phase (25 August 1997-30 November 1998) FINAL REPORT.

The cover of this CIHR Final Report is decorated with a picture that is intended to symbolize the CIHR approach to their task. The picture shows a boat in which a man wearing a krama around his neck sits at the tiller shading his eyes to look into the distance as he guides the boat. Five oarsmen row in synchrony while a bailer scoops water out of the boat. The crew all wear their krama around their waists. The legend to this picture reads:

Heading in the right direction and the team rowing in harmony—an essential good governance lesson.

The text of the Final Report returns to this picture to exemplify the approach the CIHR took in their training of the SEILA participants.

The analogy of the Cambodian boat is used, a feature of local culture. If there is no one steering, if the team do not row in harmony, they will drift, perhaps hit obstacles, and generally not get where they intend. SEILA participants were able to assimilate this lesson much better from this familiar analogy. ( Final Report page 6)

The concept of “good governance” that motivates the CIHR choice of image and which underlies their curriculum design apparently reflects CIHR’s understanding of the emphasis of the CARERE2 project and SEILA program. The success of the SEILA program is held to be based on ability of the government (the man at the tiller) to administer development programs effectively and in a participatory manner (the oarsmen).

Following this approach, CIHR endeavored to provide officials with basic lessons in governance, democracy, civic education, and management directly related to the roles and responsibilities of these officials. The key themes of the training were stated to be public service, management skills, ethics, transparency, accountability, public access and dispute resolution.

B. Background to the Evaluation

The Center for Advanced Study (CAS) was contracted to conduct a survey evaluation to assess the impact of the training on the participants and to assess whether or not the objectives of the CIHR Good Governance project directed at SEILA development program administrators were achieved.

The CAS was chosen to conduct the survey evaluation for several reasons. CAS was recognized to have the institutional capacity to undertake this kind of survey and has considerable familiarity with the governance sector.[1] The CAS also completed a similar survey of CIHR training for The Asia Foundation (TAF). TAF had supported CIHR training of government officials at the provincial, district and commune level in advance of the National Elections. This TAF funded CIHR training shared many similar components with the CARERE funded CIHR training.[2] Moreover, CAS had also recently conducted an intensive case study of governance practice in the context of the SEILA development program at the commune and village level in one of the SEILA provinces in the Northwest for UNCDF, which is a major contributor to the UNDP/CARERE2 project.[3]

UNDP/CARERE2 asked CAS to provide a systematic and independent assessment of the impact and effectiveness of CIHR’s training in the principles of Management and Good Governance. The survey was intended to assess the impact of the training on the participants’ knowledge, attitudes and performance in their work.

C. Methodology

The Terms of Reference for this study call for an assessment of competency in the curriculum areas covered by the CIHR training and an assessment of changes in attitude and performance in carrying out SEILA duties. Several study approaches were needed to accomplish these assessments. The quantitative findings generated by our survey approach are presented in Part One of this report. The qualitative findings developed from our interview approach are presented in Part Two of the report.

1. Survey Instrument Development

The quantitative approach required the construction of a complex survey instrument. The questionnaire was designed, first of all, to provide a test of competency, knowledge and retention of the Management and Good Governance curriculum delivered by CIHR. But the questionnaire was also designed to investigate specifically the understanding of government officials of the principles of management and good governance that were related to their administrative duties within the SEILA rural development program.

Some portions of the curriculum CIHR presented to SEILA participants for CARERE2 closely resembled the curriculum CIHR had utilized in the TAF supported training. So the questionnaire CAS had developed for the TAF survey provided an initial basis for this CARERE study.

The Khmer researchers at CAS reviewed the Khmer language curriculum materials CIHR had used in their SEILA training and modified and expanded the TAF instrument to reflect the changes CIHR had made for the SEILA training course. This core of the questionnaire was translated into English, fine tuned, and then translated back into Khmer. This part of the questionnaire was then pre-tested in Kampong Chhnang and refinements were incorporated to assure that the questions were framed to be clear, unambiguous and would not require any extra explanations by the researchers during their work with informants in the field.

2. Sampling

A stratified cluster sample design was used to survey trainees in the SEILA provinces. A Control sample, without training and from a non-SEILA province was also included in the survey. CIHR provided us with attendance sheets for all the training sessions provided to SEILA participants. These lists were organized by level in SEILA and government administration. Trainees at the provincial and district level in each province were selected on a simple random basis from the lists. In view of the large number of commune level trainees, cluster sampling of communes was carried out. Communes to be sampled were selected by a simple random method from a list of all communes included in the training. Within the communes selected, trainees to be surveyed were selected on a simple random basis from the participant lists.

The sampling of trainees followed a method of obtaining representative quota samples constructed to reflect the composition of the trainee population, using categories of province and level of service in the SEILA structure. A sample of trainees, N=355, was surveyed out of a trainee population of 2178.

3. Administration of the Survey

Our experience with the evaluation of CIHR training for TAF taught us two lessons. First, we had to make our questions relating to knowledge and retention of the curriculum material challenging enough to obtain a satisfactory dispersion of trainee scores. Our success is reflected in a moderate rate of very high or perfect scores in this survey of trainee knowledge. Second, we had to administer the survey in a way that assured an accurate reflection of the individual respondent’s performance. In this connection, our researchers refused to give any comment on any question in the survey. Our researchers also refused to allow the survey instrument to be taken home by the officials and returned the following day.

This combination of survey administration improvements over our TAF effort produced a picture of overall lower scores than we had obtained in the TAF survey evaluation, using a different, but similar, instrument. Our strict survey administration procedure also probably contributed to an unavoidable number of “user missing” responses when the informant did not wish to commit to either an affirmative or negative response. These user-missing responses are excluded from most of the analysis below. These missing responses also account for slight differences in the size of the sample available for different analyses.

The Center for Advanced Study assembled a highly skilled group of researchers to carry out this assessment project. The coordinator of the field research was Dr. Hean Sokhom. His team of fieldworkers on the quantitative survey evaluation included Ms. Kin Tep Moly, BA, Mr. Heng Kim Van, MA, Mrs. Lim Sidedine, MA, Mr. Hun Tearith, MA, Ms. Chraleung Chanvatey, BA, Ms. Ros Dadanet, BA, Mr. Im Sokrithy, MA, and Ms. In Sokritya, BA. Mr. Kim Sedara, BA, led the team conducting the qualitative interview assessment. His team members included Ms. Nguon Sokunthea, BA and Ms. Chan Kanha, BA. The CAS administrative staff, including Ms. Dy Many, Ms. Van Sovathana, MA and Mrs Khim Kunthy, BA, assisted in the processing and entering of the data for analysis.

FINDINGS PART ONE: Quantitative Assessment of the Training

A. Performance in Curriculum Areas

1. Comparison of High Scores Achieved

Table 1. Comparison of High Scores [Performance at or above 90% correct]

Curriculum Area	SEILA trainees %	Control %	D	Sig.
Management	88.17	83.95	4.22	.303
Good Governance	90.99	86.42	4.57	.215
Moral Governance	41.13	32.10	9.03	.134
Human Rights and Buddhism	66.76	72.84	-6.08	.291
Democracy and Elections	83.38