Imagine that you have recently been hired as a program evaluator. You work for a clinic that provides health care and health education to people of varying socioeconomic levels, educational levels, and cultural backgrounds.
As your first assignment, you are responsible for evaluating a program on childhood obesity run by the clinic. As one of your critical steps, you must engage stakeholders who have an investment in the program or may be affected by the results of the program.
How might you effectively engage them? Engaging stakeholders is a critical, initial step of program evaluation. Your ability to effectively engage stakeholders can contribute significantly toward the success of the program.
This week, you explore the purposes and significance of program evaluation. You analyze influences of stakeholder expectations on the purposes of evaluation. In addition, Understanding the Purposes of Evaluation and Identifying Stakeholders
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) Framework for Program Evaluation provides a foundational framework for program evaluation. This framework is designed to "improve and account for public health actions [through] procedures that are useful, feasible, ethical, and accurate" (CDC, 2011, para. 1).
Step one of the Framework for Program Evaluation, engaging stakeholders, focuses on encouraging participation from people who have an investment in the program. By engaging stakeholders, program evaluators can increase the usefulness and improve the credibility of the evaluation.
During the engagement process, it is important for evaluators to keep the purposes of the program evaluation in mind, meaning why the stakeholders may want the program evaluated, in order to obtain useful evaluation data for stakeholders.
To preparation
• Review the CDC's Framework for Program Evaluation. Reflect on the steps and standards related to engaging stakeholders.
• Select a public health program plan for use in this Discussion. You may select one that you previously developed or one from the Learning Resources.
• Review the categories of stakeholders in the Salabarría-Peña, Apt, and Walsh text. Select at least one stakeholder from each category and think about his or her potential needs and expectations.
• Review the six purposes of evaluation in the McKenzie, Neiger, and Thackeray text. Think about which purposes apply to your public health program and why they are important.
• Think about potential stakeholder expectations and how those expectations may influence the purposes of program evaluation.
• Review the Course Project Guidelines and work on Week 1 of your Course Project.