This article reports research that examined the meaning of two broad evaluator competency domains. The first is "situational awareness" (SA) that focuses on understanding the unique contexts of evaluations and their users/stakeholders. The second is "interpersonal competence" (IC) that focuses on social skills needed for…

The purpose of this study was to develop triangulation coding methods for a large-scale action research and evaluation project and to examine how practitioners and policy makers interpreted both convergent and divergent data. We created a color-coded system that evaluated the extent of triangulation across methodologies (qualitative and…

Problem definition in program planning and evaluation is rarely problematized. In this article, I discuss why the lack of problem problematization is itself problematic--in other words, why treating problems as self-evident can pose a risk for evaluation practice. Then, to help avoid such risks, I suggest Carol Bacchi's "What's the Problem…

This article examines factors that could have influenced whether evaluations of U.S. government--funded foreign assistance programs completed in 2015 had considered unintended consequences. Logit regression models indicate that the odds of considering unintended consequences were increased when all or most of seven standard data collection methods…

Social justice evaluation approaches advance antioppressive and culturally responsive methods to mitigate societal inequalities. However, social justice efforts will fall short if they focus solely on one side of inequality: oppression. Accordingly, this article argues that the other side of inequality--privilege--needs to be scrutinized. This…

Sustainable community health improvement often requires the implementation of complex interventions in complex systems. Drawing from the "Four Keys to Success" frame (theory, implementation, support, and evaluation), this article describes how we used a formative evaluation approach to foster a learning system capable of monitoring and…

This brief report describes the conception, development, and use of a rubric in evaluating the feasibility of a new program. The evaluators searched for a meta-analytic tool to help organize ideas about what data to collect, and why, in order to create a detailed story of feasibility of implementation for the client. The main advantage of using…

Evaluator education programs have developed to help support the growth of professional evaluators and improve evaluation practice. Empirical research has described where and how evaluation is taught at the graduate level of education, but little is known about the undergraduate level. This study empirically explores how, if at all, evaluation is…

The integrated nature of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) calls for greater synergy, harmonization, and complementarity in development work. This is to be reflected in evaluation. Despite a long and diversified history spanning over almost three decades, joint evaluations have fallen out of fashion. Evaluators tend to shy away from joint…

Culturally responsive approaches to evaluation are emerging across diverse program and community contexts to address increasingly intractable social, economic, political, and environmental concerns. Despite the sense of urgency, responsibility, and moral obligation motivating the use of these approaches, however, empirical research on the…

Internet surveys of American Evaluation Association (AEA) members are a common method for studying evaluation practice. Response rates obtained from Internet surveys of AEA members are, however, frequently very small. To investigate whether or not material incentives increase response rates to Internet surveys of AEA members, a between-subjects…

Despite enduring and unacceptable disparities in health outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians as well as people living in rural and remote locations, evidence indicates that health services are not routinely evaluated. This article describes an exploration of a context where evaluators and community partners have achieved…

Evaluators have been slow to "plug" into the digital world, let alone engage with the strategic implications of the Big Data revolution for the evaluation discipline. Yet, Big Data holds enormous promise for extending the reach and improving the quality of evaluation practice. Equally, systematic recourse to evaluation would greatly…

Advocacy outcomes are not self-evident. Identifying advocacy outcomes is extremely difficult because they are often intangible, arising from (personal) interactions, and they are not always traceable. This challenges conventional evaluation methods, which is recognized in the advocacy evaluation literature. However, current evaluation methods…

This article shares lessons from the field with program evaluations in the English-Speaking Commonwealth Caribbean (ESCC) region. The research highlighted that the challenges faced by evaluators working in the ESCC are quite similar to those experienced by evaluators elsewhere. However, the findings note the impact of the region's colonial past…