1. Given the growing interest in accountability, social work research is often directed toward program evaluation. Program evaluation became especially popular in the 1960s and is research designed to evaluate a program, service, intervention, or treatment by examining outcomes, processes, implementation, efficiency, or even diagnostic evaluations designed to assess the need for the program in the first place.
2. The purposes of evaluation include assessing: (1) the ultimate success of the program; (2) problems in how programs are being implemented; and (2) information needed in program planning and development.
3. Summative evaluations are concerned with evaluating the success of programs, especially whether they achieve their goals, and whether a program should be funded. Formative evaluations are focused on acquiring information that is helpful in planning programs or in improving their performance.
4. Evaluations can be done by the agency itself or outside contractors. Inside evaluations are often more interested in formative evaluations and are most often geared to finding out what can be done to improve the program. Outside evaluations are often more interested in summative evaluations: whether the program is working effectively and achieving its goals. Inside evaluations are often more sensitive to the way the program actually works but often are muted in their criticisms. Outside evaluations are often more willing to be critical when necessary but are often not as well informed of the actual operations of the program.
5. Outcome evaluations determine if the program is achieving its goals, e.g., whether say a drug treatment program has a high rate of clients who complete the program and are no longer have an addiction to that particular drug. A key issue here is how to measure goal attainment.
6. Process evaluations focus on the procedures and processes used to administer the program and evaluates whether they are the best way to go about running the program, as the procedures of a foster care program for choosing foster families.
7. Implementation evaluations focus more on the evaluation of how service providers actually carry out the program and specifically whether they actually did what they were supposed to do and if not what did they do instead.
8. Efficiency evaluations quantify costs or compare costs and benefits to see if the program is operating efficiently. Quantifying costs and benefits can get highly contestable.
9. Needs assessments help diagnose the extent to which there is a need for the program and related issues, such as whether people would use a service if it were made available. Needs assessments in recent years often also examine assets, such as a study of a poor neighborhood might examine not just the deficiencies in the neighborhood, as in the poverty, unemployment and crime rates, but also assets such as the number of locally owned business, community centers, parks, job training facilities that might be already present in the neighborhood. Asset-based research can help identify pre-existing community strengths that can be supported.
10. Needs and asset assessments are often quantitative studies: sample surveys, rates under treatment and social indicators research. Survey would question the relevant population and tabulate the results from such a questionnaire study. Rates under treatment analysis would often examine case records to see if a client population had particular needs or strengths that should be emphasized or responded to with programming new services. Social indicators research might look at the poverty, unemployment and crime rates of neighborhoods to propose where to concentrate new services or programs or how to tailor them to particular neighborhoods.
11. Needs and asset assessments can also be qualitative in a variety of ways: key informant interviews, focus group studies, community forums. Key informant interviews would often involve intensive interviewing of selected individuals chosen for their inside knowledge of the community or group. Focus groups would record the deliberations of a small group of people chosen by a purposive sample to provide information on how various groups (clients, providers, community residents, etc.) feel about issues related to the program. Community forums are public meetings open to the public to receive input about the problem under consideration. Ideally needs assessments will use or triangulate several approaches and will balance the assessment of needs with the inventorying of available assets.
12. While all research reflects implicit and explicit biases, and all research has political implications that researchers, providers, clients and others contest, program evaluation is highly vulnerable to politicization. Key actors, such as agency personnel, policymakers and relevant political interest groups often seek to influence evaluations. Sometimes agency personnel, for instance, will resist cooperating, at times taking action to affect the research, especially regarding who participates in it. Outside groups for example will at times seek to use findings out of context or overinterpret conclusions in order to justify reducing funding. Good program evaluation, like good social research generally, involves trying to anticipate how politics is part of the process, from topic selection, to observation and measurement, to data interpretation.