Program Evaluation Pragmatic Methods for Social Work and Human Service Agencies

You’ve come a long way since Chapter 1. You’ve learned about the different purposes and types of evaluation, how to assess needs, how to survey clients and program staff, how to measure program outcomes, the logic and utility of feasible outcome designs, how to strengthen the causal logic of feasible outcome designs, how to conduct and interpret single-case outcome designs, practical and political pitfalls in outcome evaluations, how to analyze and present data from formative and process evaluations and from outcome evaluations, and how to write an evaluation report in a manner that will improve its chances of being read and utilized. This epilogue will examine things that you can do throughout the evaluation process to increase the chances that your report and evaluation will be successful. Some of the tips were mentioned in previous chapters, but warrant repeating because of their importance. Other tips will be new.