Being an Evaluator Your Practical Guide to Evaluation

Demystifying the evaluation journey, this is the first evaluation mentoring book that addresses the choices, roles, and challenges that evaluators must navigate in the real world. Experienced evaluator and trainer Donna R. Podems covers both conceptual and technical aspects of practice in a friendly, conversational style. She focuses not just on how to do evaluations but how to think like an evaluator, fostering reflective, ethical, and culturally sensitive practice. Extensive case examples illustrate the process of conceptualizing and implementing an evaluation--clarifying interventions, identifying beneficiaries, gathering data, discussing results, valuing, and developing recommendations. The differences (and connections) between research, evaluation, and monitoring are explored. Handy icons identify instructive features including self-study exercises, group activities, clarifying questions, facilitation and negotiation techniques, insider tips, advice, and resources. Purchasers can access a companion website to download and print reproducible materials for some of the activities and games described in the book.

I. Doing Evaluation and Thinking Evaluatively
1. Speaking the Language
2. The Tale of the Researcher and Evaluator
3. Starting the Evaluative Journey
4. How We Know What We Know and Why We Think That
5. Data and Credibility: What Inquiring Evaluator Minds Need to Know
6. Linking Problem Statements, Interventions, and Results
7. All about Results
8. Talking Intervention Theory (and Logic)
9. Assessing and Evaluating Progress
10. Completing the Evaluation Journey: Pulling It All Together
II. Working as an Evaluator and Exploring Evaluation
11. The Personal Choices of Being an Evaluator
12. Thinking about Values
13. Thinking about Power, Politics, Culture, Language, and Context
14. The Scholarly Side of Being an Evaluator
15. Navigating the Maze of Evaluation Choices
16. The World of Recommendations
17. The Dirty Laundry Chapter
Epilogue

Donna R. Podems, PhD, is Founder and Director of OtherWISE: Research and Evaluation, an evaluation consultancy in Cape Town, South Africa. She was Senior Research Fellow at Stellenbosch University for 10 years and is currently Senior Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg and Assistant Professor at Michigan State University. Dr. Podems has served on the National Boards of the South African Monitoring and Evaluation Association and the American Evaluation Association (AEA), and is Chair of the AEA's International Working Group. She has edited a book on democratic evaluation and has written numerous articles and book chapters on feminist evaluation, process evaluation, principles-focused evaluation, systems evaluation, utilization-focused evaluation, democratic evaluation, and professionalizing of evaluation.