Social Construction of Reality - Bad Request

published meeting schedule. Another respondent warned, “building a culture for program
evaluation will require sacrificing the ideal. Although people hate surveys, open-ended
focused interviews, and large stakeholder meetings, the balance must be found among
those three tools. Covey said, “No investment, no involvement” (Electronic survey, May
2). It is important to note that none of the respondents suggested doing away with large
stakeholder meetings entirely. The minimum requirement seemed to be two full
meetings: an orientation and a full-group wrap-up session.
Question 3. To what extent should program evaluations be designed to investigate
and put a valuation on a program’s qualitative benefits? Responses to this question were
divided. Half of the respondents responded strongly that it was the job of program
evaluation to plan for and integrate an understanding of qualitative benefits. One
respondent exclaimed, “Very. Identifying and valuing (maybe not in dollars) qualitative
benefits should be one of the key outputs of program evaluations. How else can we know
if we are accomplishing what we intended; and it might lead to a restatement of our
intent” (Electronic survey, May 3). Another wrote, “an evaluation without qualitative
consideration is not complete; qualitative information is essential to see/know the whole
picture” (Electronic Survey, May 2). The other half of the respondents was more non-
committal in their responses, landing squarely in the realm of “it depends” (Electronic
survey, May 1). None of the respondents believed it was necessary to tie qualitative
benefits to dollars.
Question 4. Should “evaluation capacity building” be an official part of the
program evaluation process? Why or why not? Seven of the eight respondents said yes to
this. One elaborated, “absolutely, or we’ll have to do major evaluations of everything
82