Читать книгу An Introduction to Evaluation - Chris Fox - Страница 37

However, it is too simplistic to characterise the development of the evaluation sector as starting with goal-based models, which are then superceded by actor models and economic models. In this regard, Vedung’s (2010) analogy of different waves of evaluation depositing sediments which form present-day evaluation activities is useful. For Vedung the most recent ‘wave’ of evaluation started in the mid-1990s and is the ‘evidence-based wave’. In this wave, a hierarchy of evaluation designs in which experiments are the ‘gold standard’ has been advocated across a number of different sectors and championed by governments of differing political persuasions on both sides of the Atlantic. There is no doubt that the rise of Evidence-Based Medicine, in which systematic reviews of the evaluation evidence in which Randomised Control Trials are favoured has been influential in this movement. Many policymakers and academics from across the social policy spectrum and on both sides of the Atlantic have been impressed with the Cochrane Collaboration (www.cochrane.org) and its impact on health care, and have discussed the possibility of implementing similar models of evidence-based practice in sectors as diverse as criminal justice, education and development. The more recently established Campbell Collaboration (www.campbellcollaboration.org) is perhaps the most systematic in attempting to replicate this approach across social policy.