Chapter 7: Design Options from a Research Program on Participatory Evaluation

We talked about some of our own research in Part II of the book and in Chapter 6 of Part III. In this chapter, we will focus on methodological issues associated with this work. There are three primary reasons for this. First, as the chapter title conveys, we are not discussing a collection of isolated research studies; rather, the focus is on a coherent research program. We wish to manifest our commitment to the concept of a research program and to share some of the benefits that may accrue. To our knowledge, in the general domain of inquiry of evaluation, research programs of this magnitude are few and far between; and perhaps even less prevalent with regard to participatory evaluation and cognate approaches to collaborative inquiry. We believe that research programs of this sort can benefit our field in many ways and on many levels. As such, we wish to encourage, if not stimulate such initiatives among colleagues and other interested parties. It is our hope that by merely describing our program and alerting evaluators to some methodological possibilities, an agenda of increased commitment to empiricism in evaluation may be nudged forward, even if only marginally so.