Standards-Based and Responsive Evaluation

"We can be grateful that Dr. Stake decided to cap his distinguished career by sharing his ideas in writing. This is a book that evaluators will want to have in their personal library. It tells us a lot about our field, highlights contrasting ways of evaluating without pitting one against the other, and manages to remind us why many of us chose this line of work in the first place."

--EVALUATION AND PROGRAM PLANNING

Authored by a master writer and evaluator, Standards-Based and Responsive Evaluation explores the many conceptual choices an evaluator needs to make when doing an evaluation, devoting attention to stakeholders, weighing ethical risks, and writing a useful report.

The book begins with the main strategic choices an evaluator needs to make between approaches: quantitatively,by explicating criteria, needs, standards, and performances, or qualitatively, by studying the activity, aspirations, problems, and accomplishments of the participants and critical observers. After reading the text, students will have a better appreciation of evaluation as a process that needs to be custom-fit to the situation. Throughout the book, Stake presents evaluation as a series of choices for the reader:

- To remain independent or to join with program staff or stakeholders

- To value personal experience as evidence or to shun it as biased

- To aid development formatively or to assess the existing program summatively

- To use issues, goals, gains, efficiency, or problem solving as the key conceptual structure

- To invest small or large in trying out and validating data-gathering procedures

- To support the standards and ethical codes of professional associations

Standards-Based and Responsive Evaluation will prove an essential text for program evaluation courses in education, nursing, social work, psychology, sociology, communication, and anthropology. Experienced researchers and professional evaluators will also find this an invaluable reference for a more experiential, interpretive approach to evaluation work and policy setting.

Key Features:

- Provides readers with the tools they need to make choices while practicing evaluation

- Employs quotations, poetry, and cartoons to help the reader "experience" the concepts of evaluation

- Includes boxed examples from a variety of cases, giving readers the opportunity to compare an actual evaluation situation with one in which they may be engaged

- Allows readers to access extensive examples of evaluation reports, coding excerpts, and more, through a complementary Web site appendix