Exploring How Program Community Members Are Engaged in Evaluation Projects
This dissertation explored how evaluators engage program community members in their evaluation projects. While there are ongoing debates on its efficacy, evaluation engagement is a widely discussed topic among evaluation practitioners and scholars. However, despite the growth in the literature surrounding engaging program community members in evaluation, there is a need for more methodologically rigorous studies of the topic (Brandon & Fukunaga, 2014). This dissertation seeks to address this gap by investigating why, who, when, and how program community members are engaged in the evaluation process, as well as the competencies, challenges, and strategies that evaluators associate with the engagement. It utilized a mixed-methods design, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches to gain a comprehensive understanding of program community engagement in evaluations. The study had two phases; the first was primarily qualitative and involved interviewing ten experts in evaluation engagement. The findings from the first phase were instrumental in designing the primarily quantitative survey in the second phase that was administered to a representative sample of 118 members of the American Evaluation Association. The findings reveal that engaging program community members in evaluations is common, but manifests differently in terms of reasons, extent, control, challenges, and strategy based on the context of the evaluation and characteristics of the evaluator. Key findings included that engagement and control by program community members followed a W-shaped pattern—declining slightly after initial stages, rising during data collection, dropping sharply during analysis, then increasing again in later phases like dissemination and use. Additionally, the findings demonstrated that program decision makers had the highest extent and control of engagement followed by program staff, then other interested parties such as government officials, and lowest extent and control for program beneficiaries. Furthermore, the dissertation chronicles the evaluation theories utilized by evaluators to guide engagement, the competencies related to evaluation engagement, and the challenges and strategies associated with engaging program community members. These findings have practical implications for professional development, evaluator training programs, and evaluation capacity-building initiatives by providing key lessons that can be used by students, educators, mentors, and evaluation facilitators to guide their exploration of evaluation engagement. This includes exploring evaluation theories and literature to get insights that they can apply in their practice, anticipating common challenges and employing proven strategies such as through budgeting for engagement, utilizing validated tools to assess and reflect on their interpersonal and other skills needed for effective engagement, and planning and monitoring evaluation engagement based on the extent and control program community groups, such as decision makers, staff, and beneficiaries, have in different evaluation phases. Ultimately, this dissertation envisions an evaluation field that prioritizes and effectively engages program community members in service of making evaluations inclusive, rigorous, and useful.
Evaluation engagement, Practical Participatory Evaluation, Program community members, American Evaluation Association, Psychology
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