Empowerment Evaluation Principles in Practice

What principles should guide an empowerment evaluation? And how can these principles actually be put into practice? One of the primary tasks in an empowerment evaluation (EE) is to increase the capacity of program stakeholders to plan, implement, and evaluate their own programs. This book presents the most current formulation of the 10 principles of EE and provides professionals and students with the tools to put these principles into practice. Through case studies of diverse evaluation projects--including community health foundation initiatives, school district programs, and a $15 million corporate program aimed at bridging the digital divide--the founder and leading proponents of EE clarify key concepts and discuss important lessons learned. Coverage includes how to balance program improvement efforts with accountability requirements; how EE can be used to guide standards-based work; how to use EE in a learning organization; the differences among empowerment, collaborative, and participatory evaluation; and much more.

David M. Fetterman is President of Fetterman & Associates, an international consulting firm, and Consulting Professor of Education and Director of Evaluation in the School of Medicine at Stanford University. Formerly he served in the School of Education at Stanford University, as Director of Evaluation, Career Development, and Alumni Relations and Director of the MA Policy Analysis and Evaluation Program. Dr. Fetterman is the past president of the American Anthropological Association's Council on Anthropology and Education and of the American Evaluation Association (AEA), and has received both the Paul Lazarsfeld Award for Outstanding Contributions to Evaluation Theory and the Myrdal Award for Cumulative Contributions to Evaluation Practice, the AEA's highest honors. He consults for organizations ranging from the U.S. Department of Education and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and provides consultations throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Japan, Finland, and South Africa. Dr. Fetterman has contributed to a variety of encyclopedias and is the author of numerous books in evaluation and in ethnography, including Foundations of Empowerment Evaluation and Empowerment Evaluation: Knowledge and Tools for Self-Assessment and Accountability.

Abraham Wandersman is Professor of Psychology at the University of South Carolina–Columbia and was interim Co-Director of the Institute for Families in Society at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Wandersman performs research and program evaluation on citizen participation in community organizations and coalitions and on interagency collaboration. He is currently co-principal investigator on a participatory research study of an empowerment evaluation system, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and is working on a project for the program implementation and dissemination branch of the CDC center for injury prevention to facilitate a process and develop a framework on "how to bring what has been shown to work in child maltreatment prevention and youth violence prevention into more widespread practice." Dr. Wandersman is a coeditor of Empowerment Evaluation: Knowledge and Tools for Self-Assessment and Accountability, and has authored or edited many other books and articles. In 1998, he received the Myrdal Award for Cumulative Contributions to Evaluation Practice from the American Evaluation Association. In 2000, he was elected President of Division 27 of the American Psychological Association (Community Psychology): The Society for Community Research and Action.