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Uses

What does it take to do good evaluation?

When you read the question above, do you immediately think about data analysis skills?  Or survey design skills? While an evaluator needs skills in data collection and analysis, these are only two of the many areas of knowledge and skill that help an evaluator succeed.  An organization’s capacity to conduct evaluation stretches well beyond any one individual’s knowledge-level or skill sets.  

Comprehensive primary prevention work requires that we work beyond the individual and relationship levels in order to create deep and meaningful change in our communities. The prospect of evaluating beyond the individual and relationship levels of our work can seem daunting. However, although the potential scope of data collection is larger for community-level initiatives, the evaluation principles and practices are the same.

Interpreting Data

When data are analyzed, they don’t automatically tell you a story or indicate how to act on them. In order to act on the data, you need to make meaning of the data through a process of interpretation. This is the point when you look at the analyzed data and say “so what?”

This step helps you determine potential explanations for why the data came out the way they did so that you know what actions to take as a result.

Once you’ve collected data, you need to turn the raw data into a form that is more useful for driving decision making. That means you need to analyze the data in some way. Qualitative and quantitative data are analyzed in different ways.

Evaluation design answers an important set of questions about how the evaluation will roll out, specifically it answers particular questions related to data collection:

• What is the context of your evaluation?
• When will you collect it?
• From whom?
• How?

What is the context?

Before planning for data collection, analysis and use, you should answer some additional questions about the context of your evaluation.

Outcomes are often a critical part of program development and evaluation. There are evaluation models that don’t require pre-determined outcomes (goal-free evaluation, for example) and innovative program development models often do not involve pre-establishing specific outcomes and rather look for emergent outcomes. However, most of us will be involved in developing and implementing programs and evaluations that require some level of specificity around outcomes or what we hope to achieve with our efforts.

This section provides an introduction on how to do evaluation and outlines general steps to take when conducting a program evaluation.