Impact evaluation’s day in the sun (Part I) November 30, 2008
Posted by Paul Duignan in : Attribution, Evaluation debates, Impact evaluation, Evaluation planning , 2comments
When you’ve been around for a while you see things come and go. Impact evaluation - evaluation looking at the longer-term (or ‘higher-level’ outcomes within an visual outcomes model) is currently enjoying a resurgence (sometimes its just called plain outcome evaluation). I’ve been attending a number of international evaluation conferences recently and had the pleasure of going to several workshops from experts on impact evaluation - Gary Henry from the University of North Carolina who ran a workshop at the United Kingdom Evaluation conference in Bristol and Charles Reichardt from the University of Denver ran a workshop on estimating the effects of interventions at the American Evaluation Conference in Denver. I thought both were excellent and showed the level of sophistication some of the experts thinking about impact/outcome evaluation are going to to do the job properly. I will blog in more detail about what they were saying a little later. However, these presentations were little oases of calm in a wider and more heated debate in evaluation circles about the resurgence of impact evaluation. (more…)