Evaluation at the cutting edge: Driving innovation and quality
| Published date | 01 March 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1035719X241230835 |
| Author | John Guenther |
| Date | 01 March 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Editorial |
Editorial
Evaluation Journal of Australasia
2024, Vol. 24(1) 3–5
© The Author(s) 2024
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DOI: 10.1177/1035719X241230835
journals.sagepub.com/home/evj
Evaluation at the cutting edge:
Driving innovation and quality
John Guenther
While evaluation is an established discipline, methodologies and approaches vary
considerably depending on context, commissioner requirements, evaluator expertise
and the culture of evaluation organisations. The field is continually developing with
innovations and adaptations emerge, often in the pursuit of improved quality or impact.
The articles in this first issue of the Evaluation Journal of Australasia for 2024,
represent some of the cutting edge methodologies and innovations that are evident in
evaluation practice around the globe.
Based on a keynote address to the Australian Evaluation Society Conference in
2023, the special feature by Andrew Leigh reports on new developments initiated by
the Australian Government through the newly formed Australian Centre for Evaluation.
A key feature of its agenda will be to conduct evaluations using Randomised Control
Trials. While Leigh acknowledges that RCTs are not always feasible or practical, he
argues that this approach avoids self-selection bias and the inherent problems asso-
ciated with observational studies. In my reading of evaluation literature, RCTs (and
quantitative studies more generally) are largely missing. Leigh argues that the Centre
will support ‘high quality’evaluations. While I don’t think it is his intention, the
assertion suggests that evaluations that are not based on RCTs or presumably some
other quantitative methodology, are not ‘high quality’. While I see a role for RCTs in
evaluation practice, I cannot agree with this conclusion. I have been involved with and
read hundreds of papers that report on what any reasonable assessment would be
described as ‘high quality’qualitative and mixed methods studies. Nevertheless, I look
forward to reading about what the Centre produces in the future.
Sandra Ayoo, Meghan Leeming and Stacy Huff also raise the issue of ‘high-quality’
evaluation in their article about program evaluation standards through the United
Nations Evaluation Quality Assessment. The one finding that struck me in this article
was the lack of correlation between assessed quality of evaluations examined, and the
management response to those evaluations. This may suggest that the impact of an
evaluation report is not determined by how good the methodology is, how reliable the
data are, or how strong the conclusions are, but on something else. The author suggest
that “rejected recommendations were often related to budget or administrative concerns
or inadequate evaluator understanding of the intervention and its contexts”(p. 35). I
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