Participant-Oriented Evaluation

From EvaluationWiki

Participatory-Collaborative Approaches might be considered a hybrid of deliberative-democratic and empowerment approaches in that they involve stakeholders in the evaluation for different philosophical and practical reasons. In these forms of evaluation, various stakeholder groups are involved in most, if not all of the evaluation (Stufflebeam, 2006). Cousins and Earl (1992) describe collaborative forms of inquiry through three dimensions: depth of stakeholder participation, stakeholder selection, and control of the evaluation process. These were further refined (Weaver & Cousins, 2004) to comprise: control of the evaluation, diversity of stakeholder groups, power distribution and use by participants, manageability of the evaluation, and depth of participation.

Cousins and Whitmore (1998) further parsed PE into two broad categories - Transformative Participatory Evaluation (T-PE) and Practical Participatory Evaluation (P-PE). P-PE is seen mostly as a North American practice (Brisolara, 1998; Cousins & Whitmore, 1998), focused on stakeholder involvement to foster greater relevance, ownership, and use (Cousins & Earl, 1992; Greene, 1988a, 1988b; Patton, 1997). T-PE uses many of the same processes as P-PE, but intends to produce social change by empowering the disempowered (Brisolara, 1998; Burke, 1998; Cousins & Whitmore, 1998). It is more aligned with Participatory Action Research's (PAR) focus on power redistribution (Brisolara, 1998; Estrella & Gaventa, n.d.; Greenwood, Whyte, & Harkavy, 1993; Sabo, 1999; Suarez-Balcazar & Harper, 2003) but differs from Empowerment Evaluation (Fetterman, 2005) in its evaluator role. While both T-PE and Empowerment Evaluation focus on empowering the disempowered, a T-PE evaluator maintains more technical control and is more engaged in managing and directing the evaluation.

Generally, the evaluator serves as a manager who guides the evaluation to provide the most valid information to judge the program’s merit, worth and significance and uses the participants in practical ways during the process. Often used in community-based programs where disparate organizations are involved in delivering services or designing interventions for their community.