The flexibility federal block grants provide recipients poses challenges for evaluation. These challenges include aggregating data on wide-ranging activities grant recipients implement and the outcomes they achieve. In 2014, we began designing an evaluation to address the challenges of assessing outcomes and to improve outcome accountability for…

Collective impact (CI) initiatives provide a promising collaborative community-based approach for addressing health disparities, but they are challenging to evaluate. This paper provides a detailed strategy for addressing these challenges through a case study, with the goal of not only of evaluating the CI, but also putting organizations in a…

Although research on evaluation instruction has increased in the past decade, little is known about evaluation education in Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH)-accredited schools of public health and master of public health (MPH) programs. In this study, instruction of competencies for program evaluators as enumerated by Stevahn, King,…

This article examines the theoretical basis of the community as it is evoked in health evaluation. In particular, we examine how hospitals carrying out Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNAs) define communities as well as the implications for these definitions for how to study and engage community problems. We present qualitative findings from…

Interest from Congress, executive branch leadership, and various other stakeholders for greater accountability in government continues to gain momentum today with government-wide efforts. However, measuring the impact of research programs has proven particularly difficult. Cause and effect linkages between research findings and changes to…

The evaluation community has demonstrated an increased emphasis and interest in evaluation capacity building in recent years. A need currently exists to better understand how to measure evaluation capacity and its potential outcomes. In this study, we distributed an online questionnaire to managers and evaluation points of contact working in…

Evaluating initiatives implemented across multiple settings can elucidate how various contextual factors may influence both implementation and outcomes. Understanding context is especially critical when the same program has varying levels of success across settings. We present a framework for evaluating contextual factors affecting an initiative…

There is a growing call for evaluation capacity building (ECB); although the area currently lacks a rich research base, there are few robust methods and practice through which to define it. The argument in this article is that the impact of evaluation is mediated by program stakeholders' engagement in evaluation activities. This mediation provides…

Developmental evaluation (DE), essentially conceptualized by Patton over the past 30 years, is a promising evaluative approach intended to support social innovation and the deployment of complex interventions. Its use is often justified by the complex nature of the interventions being evaluated and the need to produce useful results in real time.…

This study provides an understanding of how the coursework required for attaining a Masters of Public Health (MPH) degree in epidemiology or health education from accredited schools or programs of public health prepares students to evaluate programs or interventions. Study data were generated using a content analysis of required coursework…

In attempting to use a realistic evaluation approach to explore the role of Community Parents in early parenting programs in Toronto, a novel technique was developed to analyze the links between contexts (C), mechanisms (M) and outcomes (O) directly from experienced practitioner interviews. Rather than coding the interviews into themes in terms of…