Fitzpatrick, Jody L.

(b. 1948, Waco, Texas). Ph.D. Educational Psychology, M.A. Government, B.A. Government, University of Texas–Austin.

Fitzpatrick is Professor in the Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado. Before coming to academia, she conducted numerous evaluations for organizations at state and local levels. Her areas of interests are program theory, ethics, and evaluation use. She has conducted evaluations in a variety of settings with a focus on programs concerning children, women, and families. Her most recent evaluations concern programs to encourage girls’ achievement in math and science and factors that influence women to choose careers in technology. Primary influences on her evaluation work include Thomas Kuhn, Carol Weiss, Joseph Wholey, and Eleanor Chelimsky.

Her contributions to the practice of evaluation include her column “Exemplary Evaluations” in the American Journal of Evaluation, in which she interviews well-known evaluators about the choices they made in a specific evaluation and the factors that influenced those choices. The intent of the column is to illustrate the array of choices and the difficult decisions that evaluators face, not only in methodology, but in determining the focus of their questions, who the stakeholders are that they serve, and the judgments they make.

She is a coauthor of the textbook Program Evaluation: Alternative Approaches and Practical Guidelines (with Blaine Worthen and Jim Sanders) and has authored numerous articles on evaluation and ethics in evaluation.

She has served on the board of the American Evaluation Association and as Associate Editor of the American Journal of Evaluation. She has also won the Outstanding Teaching Award from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.