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Evaluation Research

Evaluation research is about assessing the consequences of public policy. The emphasis can be either on the policy process or on the outputs and the outcomes of the policies. Evaluation research thus has a clear democratic and learning goal: to inform the decision makers, citizens, and interest groups whether public policies have or have not had the intended consequences. Whether public policies result in alleviating public problems is a central question for many societal stakeholders. Govern ments are keen on showing that the practiced policy making has been effective and that promises made during an election campaign have been kept. In addition, evaluation is an important tool of monitoring; governments as principals use evaluation to keep the agents and the bureaucracy accountable. Opposition parties, in principle, are as keen on showing that government policies have not had the intended effects. The media and think tanks inform citizens, and to do so, they need information on activities. This definition implies, first, that evaluation research is usually empirical and, second, that evaluation is usually bound to the goals of public policy making. This is, however, not the only option. Seen against the multitude of benefits it serves, evaluation research is not without problems. The academic element of evaluation research is to develop and further improve the tools with which to evaluate. The problems of evaluation concern both the practice of evaluation—how to do it—and the usage of evaluation. This entry focuses on the how question, and thereafter the focus moves on to the usage of evaluation.

Conducting Evaluation

Researchers engaged in the evaluation of public policies face a number of choices related to approach, focus, and criteria. First, various forms of evaluation research differ from each other on the basis of the selected approach. The principal approaches are formative and summative evaluation. Formative evaluation monitors the way in which a program is being administered or managed so as to provide feedback that may serve to improve the implementation process. Summative evaluation measures how a program has actually affected the problems it was designed to address. Second, evaluation can focus on various parts in a policy process: on the process or implementation at various levels of government, ranging from the top of the hierarchy to the grassroots bureaucrats, or on the outputs and outcomes. Third, evaluation can focus on various aspects of the process or outputs. The approach and focus used determine the criteria for evaluating a program's success. Usually, evaluation involves a comparison of the goals and impacts of a program, with the program's goals often selected as the yardstick for measuring or evaluating success. But efficiency, organizational changes, stakeholder concerns, and democracy can also be used as criteria. In other words, if a new policy aims at diminishing traffic accidents, the evaluator assesses whether this indeed has been the result. Other options include focusing on economy (Has money been wasted?), democracy (Did the program respond to popular will?), or impacts. In recent decades, public administration has moved into using performance indicators (PI) to guide agencies and lower rank officials to aim at the negotiated targets. For example, in academia, PI may include the number of publications and student achievement scores; for health care, PI may include the number of operations and patient calls. The debate concerning the use of PI has pointed out that the choice of indicators is important so as not to narrow the target field too much and has warned that top-down set indicators can have a demoralizing effect on lower rank officials' professional drive for work improvement.

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