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…

Evaluations that include stakeholders aim to understand their perspectives and to ensure that their views are represented. This article offers a new approach to gaining stakeholder perspectives through crowdsourcing. We recruited a sample of individuals with chronic low back pain through a crowdsourcing site. This sample coded textual data…

Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) is gaining ground in evaluation circles, but the number of applications is still limited. In this article, we consider the challenges that can emerge during a QCA evaluation by drawing on our experience of conducting one in the field of development cooperation. For each stage of the evaluation process, we…

Project schedules are logic models that focus on the timing of program activities. Value derives from the fact that schedule changes are not random. Why they occur, and how long they last, can reveal information that would not be easily revealed with other approaches to evaluation. Also, using project schedules as logic models forges a strong link…

Chronic diseases with behavioral risk factors are now the leading causes of death in the United States. A national Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) monitors those risk factors; however, there is a need for national and state evaluations of chronic disease surveillance systems. The Department of Health and Human Services/Centers…

Evaluators can work with brief units of text-based data, such as open-ended survey responses, text messages, and social media postings. Online crowdsourcing is a promising method for quantifying large amounts of text-based data by engaging hundreds of people to categorize the data. To further develop and test this method, individuals were…

Evaluators widely agree that stakeholder involvement is a central aspect of effective program evaluation. With the exception of articles on collaborative evaluation approaches, however, a systematic review of the breadth and depth of the literature on stakeholder involvement has not been published. In this study, we examine peer-reviewed empirical…

While regression discontinuity has usually been applied retrospectively to secondary data, it is even more attractive when applied prospectively. In a prospective design, data collection can be focused on cases near the discontinuity, thereby improving internal validity and substantially increasing precision. Furthermore, such prospective…

Despite our best efforts as evaluators, program implementation failures abound. A wide variety of valuable methodologies have been adopted to explain and evaluate the "why" of these failures. Yet, typically these methodologies have been employed concurrently (e.g., project monitoring) or to the post-hoc assessment of program activities.…

This article presents discussion and recommendations on approaches to retrospectively evaluating development interventions in the long term through a systems lens. It is based on experiences from the implementation of an 18-month study to investigate the impact of development interventions on economic and social change over a 40-year period in the…

Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard in research but may not fully explain or predict outcome variations in community-based interventions. Demonstrating efficacy of externally driven programs in well-controlled environments may not translate to community-based implementation where resources and priorities vary. A bottom-up evaluation…

This article describes lessons learned about implementing evaluations in hospital settings. In order to overcome the methodological dilemmas inherent in this environment, we used a practical participatory evaluation (P-PE) strategy to engage as many stakeholders as possible in the process of evaluating a clinical demonstration project.…

In this commentary, we examine Braverman's insights into the trade-offs between feasibility and rigor in evaluation measures and reject his assessment of the trade-off as a zero-sum game. We, argue that feasibility and policy salience are, like reliability and validity, intrinsic to the definition of a good measure. To reduce the tension between…

To describe the recent practice of evaluation, specifically method and design choices, the authors performed a content analysis on 117 evaluation studies published in eight North American evaluation-focused journals for a 3-year period (2004-2006). The authors chose this time span because it follows the scientifically based research (SBR)…

The use of theory-driven evaluation is an emerging practice in the military--an aspect generally unknown in the civilian evaluation community. First developed during the 1991 Gulf War and applied in both the Balkans and Afghanistan, these techniques are now being examined in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) as a means to evaluate the…