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Standards-Based and Responsive Evaluation
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Click here for the online appendix:
http://www.sagepublications.com/StakeAppendix/stakeappendix.zip

"We can be grateful that Dr. Stake decided to cap his distinguished career by sharing his ideas in writing. This is a book that evaluators will want to have in their personal library. It tells us a lot about our field, highlights contrasting ways of evaluating without pitting one against the other, and manages to remind us why many of us chose this line of work in the first place."

--EVALUATION AND PROGRAM PLANNING

Authored by a master writer and evaluator, Standards-Based and Responsive Evaluation
explores the many conceptual choices an evaluator needs to make when doing an evaluation, devoting attention to stakeholders, weighing ethical risks, and writing a useful report.

The book begins with the main strategic choices an evaluator needs to make between approaches: quantitatively,by explicating criteria, needs, standards, and performances, or qualitatively, by studying the activity, aspirations, problems, and accomplishments of the participants and critical observers. After reading the text, students will have a better appreciation of evaluation as a process that needs to be custom-fit to the situation. Throughout the book, Stake presents evaluation as a series of choices for the reader:

- To remain independent or to join with program staff or stakeholders
- To value personal experience as evidence or to shun it as biased
- To aid development formatively or to assess the existing program summatively
- To use issues, goals, gains, efficiency, or problem solving as the key conceptual structure
- To invest small or large in trying out and validating data-gathering procedures
- To support the standards and ethical codes of professional associations

Standards-Based and Responsive Evaluation will prove an essential text for program evaluation courses in education, nursing, social work, psychology, sociology, communication, and anthropology. Experienced researchers and professional evaluators will also find this an invaluable reference for a more experiential, interpretive approach to evaluation work and policy setting.

Key Features:

- Provides readers with the tools they need to make choices while practicing evaluation
- Employs quotations, poetry, and cartoons to help the reader "experience" the concepts of evaluation
- Includes boxed examples from a variety of cases, giving readers the opportunity to compare an actual evaluation situation with one in which they may be engaged
- Allows readers to access extensive examples of evaluation reports, coding excerpts, and more, through a complementary Web site appendix


 
First Words
 
1. Criterial and Interpretive Evaluation
The Ubiquitous Search For Quality

 
Standards

 
Criterial and Episodic Thinking

 
Roles and Styles of Evaluation

 
Formative and Summative Evaluation

 
The Evaluand

 
The Evaluator

 
 
2. Roles, Models, and Dispositions
Models

 
Dispositions

 
Roles

 
 
3. Standards-Based Evaluation
Standards-Based

 
Bias

 
Factors

 
Criteria and Standards for Comparisons

 
Needs Assessment

 
Goals

 
Costs

 
Representations of Performance

 
What Goes Wrong

 
 
4. Responsive Evaluation
Issues as Conceptual Structure

 
Observations and Judgments

 
Perceptions

 
Combining Responsive and Standards-Based Evaluation

 
Experience as Knowledge

 
Organizing and Reporting

 
Procedures

 
What Goes Wrong

 
 
5. Data Gathering
Choosing Data Sources

 
Instrumentation

 
Recipient Responses

 
Staff and Management Responses

 
Stakeholder and Public Responses

 
Data Coding and Records Processing

 
Surveys

 
Observation Schedules

 
Interviewing

 
Histories and Artifacts

 
 
6. Analysis, Synthesis, and Meta-evaluation
Analysis

 
Synthesis

 
Experiential and Probative Inferences

 
Meta-evaluation

 
An Ethic of Continuous Self-Challenge

 
 
7.Clients, Stakeholders, Beneficiaries and Readers
Participatory Evaluation

 
Stakeholding

 
Utilization

 
Democratic Evaluation

 
Negotiation of a Contract

 
Writing Reports

 
Styles of Reporting

 
Representations of the Evaluand

 
Names and Labels

 
Cutting Edge

 
Offering Recommendations

 
 
8. Issues Needing Interpretation
Complexity

 
Program Standardization

 
 
Program Fairness
Staff Development

 
 
9. Evidence-Based Evaluation
Is Evaluation Science?

 
Petite and Grand Generalizations

 
Policy Evaluation

 
Bias

 
Skepticism as a Commitment

 
 
10. Doing It Right
Quality Work Is Ethical Work

 
Personal Standards

 
Professional Standards

 
Human Subjects Protection

 
Confidentiality and Anonymity

 
The Business of Evaluation

 
Personnel Evaluation

 
Product Evaluation

 
Political and Cultural Contexts

 
 
Last Words
 
References
 
Bibliography
 
Index
 
About the Author

We can be grateful that Dr. Stake decided to cap his distinguished career by sharing his ideas in writing. This is a book that evaluators will want to have in their personal library. It tells us a lot about our field, highlights contrasting ways of evaluating without pitting one against the other, and manages to remind us why many of us chose this line of work in the first place.

EVALUATION AND PROGRAM PLANNING

Offers a critical and participatory perspective on Program Evaluation

Professor Roderick J Watts
Psychology Program, City Univ Of New York Grad Ctr
August 19, 2015

I think my students will love this book because it is very pratical and adresses all the essential aspects of conducting an evaluation. This counts for the web appendix as well

Professor Frans Janssens
Faculty of Behavioural Sciences, Twente University
September 20, 2010
Key features
    • One of today's leading evaluators provides readers with the tools they need to make choices when doing an evaluation.
    • The text is engagingly written.
    • The author uses quotations, poetry, and some cartons to help the reader "experience" the concepts of evaluation.
    • Boxed examples from a variety of actual cases offer readers the opportunity to compare an actual evaluation situation with the one in which they may be engaged.
    • A Web site allows readers to access extensive examples of evaluation reports, coding excerpts, etc.

 

Sample Materials & Chapters

Stake Appendix


Sage College Publishing

You can purchase or sample this product on our Sage College Publishing site:

Go To College Site

This title is also available on SAGE Research Methods, the ultimate digital methods library. If your library doesn’t have access, ask your librarian to start a trial.