Utilization-Focused Evaluation

The Fourth Edition of the bestselling Utilization-Focused Evaluation provides expert, detailed advice on conducting program evaluations from one of leading experts. Chock full of useful pedagogy-including a unique utilization-focused evaluation checklist-this book presents Michael Quinn Patton's distinctive opinions based on more than thirty years of experience.

Key Features of the Fourth Edition

• Provides thoroughly updated materials including more international content; new references; new exhibits and sidebars; and new examples, stories, and cartoons
• Includes follow-up exercises at the end of each chapter
• Features a utilization-focused evaluation checklist
• Gives greater emphasis on mixed methods
• Analyzes the pluses and minuses of the increased emphasis on accountability and performance measurement in government at all levels
• Details the explosion of international evaluation

Intended Audience

Both theoretical and practical, this core text is an essential resource for students enrolled in Program Evaluation courses in a variety of disciplines-including public administration, government, social sciences, education, and management. Practitioners will also find this text invaluable.

Michael Quinn Patton lives in Minnesota where, according to the state's poet laureate, Garrison Keillor, "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." It was this lack of interesting statistical variation in Minnesota that led him to qualitative inquiry despite the strong quantitative orientation of his doctoral studies in sociology at the University of Wisconsin. He serves on the graduate faculty of The Union Institute, a nontraditional, interdisciplinary, nonresidential and individually designed doctoral program. He was on the faculty of the University of Minnesota for 18 years, including five years as Director of the Minnesota Center for Social Research, where he was awarded the Morse-Amoco Award for innovative teaching. Readers of this book will not be surprised to learn that he has also won the University of Minnesota storytelling competition.

He has authored five other Sage books: Utilization-Focused Evaluation, Creative Evaluation, Practical Evaluation, How to Use Qualitative Methods in Evaluation, and Family Sexual Abuse: Frontline Research and Evaluation. He edited Culture and Evaluation for the journal New Direction in Program Evaluation. His creative nonfiction book, Grand Canyon Celebration: A Father-Son Journey of Discovery, was a finalist for 1999 Minnesota Book of the Year.

He is former President of the American Evaluation Association and the only recipient of both the Alva and Gunner Myrdal Award for Outstanding Contributions to Useful and Practical Evaluation from the Evaluation Research Society and the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for Lifelong Contributions to Evaluation Theoryfrom the American Evaluation Association. The Society for Applied Sociology awarded him the 2001 Lester F. Ward Award for Outstanding Contributions to Applied Sociology.