Chapter 10: Toward Deepened Understandings of Evaluation Use and Decision Making in Society: Lessons Learned, Challenges, and Opportunities

Ensuring and supporting use of information produced by evaluation in stakeholders’ decision-making processes has been a long-standing priority for the evaluation community. However, studying use and decision making in practice has been challenging because it requires direct observation, which is often not possible. The process of using information to make decisions and the decision act itself tend not to be visible to outside observers. Rather, researchers must rely on inference to arrive at conclusions about use as a process and an outcome. Thus, a gap exists between these two phenomena and, to bridge it, we must carefully consider the nature of decision making as a specific kind of use.