The Harvard Family Research Project separated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to become the Global Family Research Project as of January 1, 2017. It is no longer affiliated with Harvard University.
Volume IV, Number 2, 1998
Issue Topic: Evaluation in the 21st Century
From the Director's Desk
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| Heather Weiss |
In 15 months, we will each, in our own way, mark the beginning of a new century—indeed, a new millennium. The stocktaking and foreshadowing have already begun as conversations, public debates, and articles and analyses focus on how far we have come and what the future might hold.
This issue of The Evaluation Exchange is the first of two which discuss new themes for evaluation in the 21st century. Our focus in this issue—new voices, new methods, new relationships—reminds us that ours is an ever-changing field and one which always provides new challenges as well as new opportunities.
In this issue, we have brought together a selection of articles that provide a variety of perspectives and provocative and thoughtful ideas about where evaluation is heading. Our Theory and Practice section highlights the experiences of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Evaluation Grants Program, an innovative foundation-sponsored evaluation approach that rethinks the traditional program-evaluator relationship and offers the promise of enabling us to learn better about what works and what does not. We include an article by Jim Sanders of the Evaluation Institute in our Promising Practices section. Sanders discusses the utility of cluster evaluation as a way to examine multiple programs. In our Questions and Answers section, evaluator, educator, and author Carol Weiss shares her thoughts about what the next century might mean for the field of evaluation, the training of evaluators, and the connection between evaluation and policymaking. In our Beyond Basic Training section, we highlight three innovative approaches to including stakeholders in the design and implementation of evaluations. Stan Schneider from Metis Associates writes about using students as ethnographers in a study of a family resource center; Betty Cooke of the Minnesota Department of Children, Families and Learning describes Minnesota's experiences using program staff as data collectors; and Cheryl Fish-Parcham of Families USA and Theresa Shivers of United Planning Organization/Head Start write about using client families in a study of managed health care. Our Spotlight section features an article by Tom Gais of the Rockefeller Institute of Government, which discusses the use of information technology in welfare reform. In our Evaluations to Watch section, we revisit an evaluation tool used by the Asian Neighborhood Design, which was featured in a previous issue (Vol. III, No. 1), and which is now being used to examine welfare reform efforts in San Francisco. In our Electronic Mailbox and New and Noteworthy sections, we provide information on current resources, with a particular focus on toolkits to assist with evaluation.
We have also enclosed a reader survey and I encourage all of you to share your thoughts with us. Since the inception of the newsletter, we have worked to provide an interactive forum to share innovative evaluation ideas and practices. In the coming years, we hope to continue to meet this need, and we would greatly appreciate your comments about how we can best do so.
As this century draws to a close, no doubt all of us working in the field of child and family services will reflect on what we have accomplished, what we have learned, and how we move into the next century with renewed energy and enthusiasm. The discussion about where evaluation is heading is an important one, and we plan to continue contributing to the conversation.
Heather B. Weiss, Ed.D.
Founder & Director
Harvard Family Research Project