Evaluation
Strategies
'Evaluation
strategies' means broad, overarching perspectives on evaluation. They encompass
the most general groups or "camps" of evaluators; although, at its
best, evaluation work borrows eclectically from the perspectives of all these
camps. Four major groups of evaluation strategies are discussed here.
Scientific-experimental
models are
probably the most historically dominant evaluation strategies. Taking their
values and methods from the sciences -- especially the social sciences -- they
prioritize on the desirability of impartiality, accuracy, objectivity and the
validity of the information generated. Included under scientific-experimental
models would be: the tradition of experimental and quasi-experimental designs;
objectives-based research that comes from education; econometrically-oriented
perspectives including cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis; and the
recent articulation of theory-driven evaluation.
The
second class of strategies are management-oriented systems models.
Two of the most common of these are PERT,
the Program Evaluation and Review
Technique, and CPM, the Critical
Path Method.
Both have been widely used in business and government in this country. It would
also be legitimate to include the Logical Framework or "Logframe"
model developed at U.S. Agency for International Development and general
systems theory and operations research approaches in this category. Two
management-oriented systems models were originated by evaluators: the UTOS model where U
stands for Units, T for Treatments, O for Observing Observations and S for Settings; and the CIPP model where the C stands for Context, the I for Input, the first P for Process and the second P for Product. These management-oriented
systems models emphasize comprehensiveness in evaluation, placing evaluation
within a larger framework of organizational activities.
The
third class of strategies are the qualitative/anthropological models.
They emphasize the importance of observation, the need to retain the
phenomenological quality of the evaluation context, and the value of subjective
human interpretation in the evaluation process. Included in this category are
the approaches known in evaluation as naturalistic or 'Fourth Generation'
evaluation; the various qualitative schools; critical theory and art criticism
approaches; and, the 'grounded theory' approach of Glaser and Strauss among
others.
Finally, a fourth class of
strategies is termed participant-oriented models. As the term
suggests, they emphasize the central importance of the evaluation participants,
especially clients and users of the program or technology. Client-centered and
stakeholder approaches are examples of participant-oriented models, as are
consumer-oriented evaluation systems.
There is no inherent incompatibility
between these broad strategies -- each of them brings something valuable to the
evaluation table. In fact, in recent years attention has increasingly turned to
how one might integrate results from evaluations that use different strategies,
carried out from different perspectives, and using different methods. Clearly,
there are no simple answers here. The problems are complex and the
methodologies needed will and should be varied.
http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/intreval.php
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