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Preface

Evaluation has never been more important than it is in today’s world, and never has evaluation been confronted with so many serious challenges. In addition to having traditional evaluation skills and knowledge, today’s evaluators need to understand how to implement high-quality evaluations within different cultural contexts in a world that is increasingly distrustful of science and facts and is being bombarded with deliberate misinformation and “fake news.” The goal of our book is to guide students, practitioners, and users of evaluations to understand evaluation purposes, theories, methodologies, assets, and challenges within today’s sociocultural and political context. The book, as a whole and in the individual chapters, examines ways power and privilege and social injustices can affect different aspects of evaluation and how an understanding of these issues can help evaluators better design and implement more inclusive and culturally responsive evaluations that will ultimately improve evaluation quality and usefulness.

While designed primarily as a graduate-level textbook, this book also can serve as a reference guide for others and as a tool for professional development and training. Trainers and/or professional developers may want to use the book as a whole or to use individual chapters or groups of chapters. For example, Chapter 2, “Evaluation Ethics and Quality Standards,” would be a useful resource for a professional development session as would Chapter 15, “Evaluation as a Business.”

As people with different backgrounds and experiences and a common commitment to social justice and a more inclusive evaluation knowledge base than currently exists, we worked together to ensure a balance in coverage of theory, methods, and practice throughout the book to provide readers with the necessary background to understand social programs and the skills needed to successfully plan and engage in inclusive evaluations across diverse settings.

Who We Are

Adding to the uniqueness of the book is who we are. We view ourselves as a “perfect pairing” to bring added value to an evaluation textbook that combines years of academic and real-world experiences. Veronica Thomas (first author) is a professor of human development at Howard University and a part-time practicing evaluator. Patricia (Pat) Campbell (coauthor) is a former associate professor of research, measurement, and statistics at Georgia State University who is president of Campbell-Kibler Associates, Inc., a research and evaluation company, and a full-time practicing evaluator and researcher. There are a variety of reasons we collaborated to write this book. Both of us are longtime workers in pursuit of social justice. As the only African American elementary school student at an all-white elementary school in the South during the civil rights era, Veronica, at a very young age, became keenly attuned to issues of discrimination, marginalization, and social injustice at individual, institutional, and societal levels. Since that time, she has infused social justice agendas in her teaching, research, and service work. The most rewarding work of Veronica’s professional career continues to be the training of and collaborations with African American and other students and young professionals of color who are committed to inclusive research and evaluation with (not on) marginalized and underserved communities. In the early 1970s, Pat worked with slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers’s brother Charles to register African American voters in Mississippi and served as an advisor on his campaign for governor of Mississippi. A decade later, she coauthored the AERA Guidelines for Eliminating Race and Sex Bias in Educational Research and Evaluation. Pat’s more recent social justice efforts include conducting educational evaluation and research training in South Africa and Uganda and serving as an expert witness in the Citadel sex discrimination case.

We believe that evaluation needs to respond to Melvin Hall’s (2018, para. 3) concern “that the training evaluators receive may not provide the skillset necessary to efficaciously handle the thorny issues of race and class when they emerge through an evaluation process.” We see not only limitations in addressing issues of race and class but also insufficient guidance for attending to other areas such as disability and gender and sexual orientation. The unwavering commitment that led us to write this book is recognition that training must help evaluators to deal with difficult issues of social injustice, racism, and other “isms” in their reflective practice and to look at the unintended impacts that bias can have on their work and how, as evaluators, they must recognize and make their biases transparent and use that knowledge to improve the work they do.

We finished writing this book in February 2020 and were completing the final edits in April 2020, under self-isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. By June 2020 with surging protests against racial injustice and police brutality targeting African Americans, we, yet again, are explicitly reminded of this country’s sordid past and its continued failure to redress systemic racism and discriminatory laws and practices. During the last few months of editing this book, in many respects, the world has become a very different place. We don’t know what the future holds and we remain hopeful for a safe, healthy and equitable society. But we do know there will be an even greater need for evaluation and social justice as the world recovers.

Contents of the Book and Challenging Assumptions

Those using this as a textbook will find much of what they desire and are used to seeing in existing evaluation textbooks, including discussions of evaluation history, frameworks, models, types, planning, and methods. Not only do we cover those areas from a social justice, diversity, and inclusive lens, but we include topics often not covered extensively in evaluation texts, such as

 evaluation ethics and quality with specific focus on ethical sensitivities in settings in diverse cultural contexts;

 social programming, social justice, and evaluation that help readers understand how social problems and social programs get politicized and, sometimes, framed through a racialized lens;

 responsive stakeholder engagement including strategies and benefits of engaging the “right” stakeholders throughout the entire evaluation process;

 reporting, disseminating, and using evaluation results including communicating results in culturally appropriate ways and making evaluation findings accessible to and usable for a wide variety of stakeholders, including persons with disabilities; and

 conducting evaluation as a business to help readers who wish to do evaluation as a full-time or part-time business be successful.

In this book, we challenge a number of assumptions. Evaluation has traditionally had as its goal to provide objective judgments of the quality and effectiveness of a variety of programs, policies, projects, and interventions. This focus on objectivity has continued, even though for many years researchers and philosophers of science have debunked the illusion of objectivity in science, research, and evaluation. As we rethink the role of objectivity in evaluation, we highlight the roles of subjectivity and bias. To be good evaluators, we have to acknowledge that we all have biases, explore them, examine how they influence us and the work we do, and determine how we can most effectively work with and across our biases. This is not easy to write about or do. We include insights, examples, and lessons learned from our own work and the work of other evaluators wrestling with diversity and social justice issues in evaluation.

Throughout this book, we directly confront issues of power and privilege. The reality is that evaluations are done, generally, at the request of those with power and resources. Government agencies, private foundations, other funders, and program developers are those who either require evaluations or are required to have evaluations done. We are not saying that this is good or bad, but instead, we are acknowledging it as a fact and one that should be taken into consideration when seeking an understanding of the full context of an evaluation.

Those who commission an evaluation influence the evaluation process especially in terms of decisions about the questions that are asked, the variables over which data are collected to determine if a program or project is a “success,” and how or even if the results are used. The less powerful, often those whom a program or project is designed to serve, often have little or no voice in shaping the evaluation questions that are asked or how success is defined. This can be a contributing factor as to why so many evaluations are not “on point” or as useful as they could and should be. In the book, readers learn the importance of planning and implementation evaluations that

 engage a broad range of diverse stakeholders;

 identify and minimize ethical issues;

 ask evaluation questions that matter;

 recognize how cultural differences and inequities can impact data and data collection;

 utilize the best design for the questions; and

 employ various modes to communicate evaluation results in culturally responsive ways.

We also foreground “the elephant in the room”—race and racism and how they have impacted evaluation—while also focusing on what evaluators can and should do.

Organization and Pedagogical Features

Each chapter begins with a set of learning objectives or brief statements that describe what readers are expected to know and/or be able to do after reading the chapter and completing the activities. Examples and opportunities for discussion of perceptions and ideas are included throughout the chapters. Important terms are bolded at their first mention in the book and are defined in the glossary as well as in the first chapter in which they are mentioned.

Four features—Reflect and Discuss, Case Study, Activity, and Voices From the Field—build on the book’s overarching theme and are designed to pique readers’ interest and extend their learning opportunities. Reflect and Discuss features an issue or question that readers critically think about and discuss in small groups. Case Studies present real or hypothetical cases addressing the application of a particular theoretical, methodological, or practice issue in evaluation. Activities ask readers to do something (individually or in small groups, within class or outside class) involving the application of knowledge gained or issues raised in that particular chapter. Voices From the Field are commentaries from evaluation scholars, practitioners, and/or users about a particular issue of relevance. Each chapter ends with a brief summary followed by a description of supplemental resources for readers who wish to delve more deeply into the areas covered in the chapter. At the end of the book is a glossary of all bolded terms included throughout the chapters. Additionally, the references cited in the chapters are found following the glossary.

Teaching Resources

This text includes instructor teaching materials designed to save you time and to help you keep students engaged. To access these resources, search for this book on sagepub.com or contact your SAGE representative at sagepub.com/findmyrep.