I am Liliana Rodríguez-Campos, Co-Chair of the Collaborative, Participatory, and Empowerment Evaluation TIG. I am also an evaluation professor and the director of the Center for Research, Evaluation, Assessment and Measurement at the University of South Florida. Among other achievements, I received the American Evaluation Association’s Marcia Guttentag Award. During my evaluation career I have been working on publications and presentations, with emphasis in collaborative evaluation, including my book Collaborative Evaluations: A Step-by-Step Model for the Evaluator (available in English and Spanish). I have offered training in both English and Spanish to a variety of audiences in the US and internationally. I would like to share some tools and tips based on my experience.
Hot Tip: A collaborative evaluation process should be clear and relevant to everyone involved in it. By having a realistic evaluation scope, you and the collaboration members can establish an achievable set of needs, expectations, and deliverables. I usually ask some clarification questions, for example: (a) When should the evaluation start and finish? (b) What do you expect the evaluation will achieve? (c) What happens if results differ from your expectations? (d) How are you planning to use the information provided by this evaluation? and (e) Do other main stakeholders agree with you on how to use the evaluation results?
Rad Resources:
The MCE is a comprehensive framework for guiding collaborative evaluations in a precise, realistic, and useful manner. It has six major components and, additionally, each of the subcomponents includes a set of 10 steps suggested to support the proper use of the MCE.
This page provides information about the English and Spanish editions of my book.
Publications about evaluation in collaborative, participatory and empowerment evaluation are presented as well as blogs and links to websites containing useful information.
CREAM is a non-profit agency that achieves its mission through collaborative work on a variety of evaluation projects.
Rad Resources- Recent Articles:
- · Rodríguez-Campos, L., Martz, W., & Rincones-Gómez, R. (2010). Evaluating a Multiculturalism Seminar in a Nonprofit Setting: A Collaborative Approach. Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation 6(13).
- Rodríguez-Campos, L., Berson, M., Bellara, A., Owens, C., & Walker-Egea, C. (2010). Enhancing evaluation of a large scale civic education initiative with community-based focus groups. Studies in Learning, Evaluation, Innovation and Development 7(3), 87-100.
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Collaborative, Participatory & Empowerment Evaluation (CPE) Week with our colleagues in the CPE AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our CPE members and you may wish to consider subscribing to our weekly headlines and resources list where we’ll be highlighting CPE resources. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice.
My experience conducting both local and distance collaborative evaluations using the MCE have been great. Stakeholders I have worked with have been pleased with this type of evaluation process. Also, the recommendations and steps available in the book have been very useful guiding the evaluations. This book is clear, easy to follow, and full of information. I think it is an indispensable tool for those interested in using collaboration as a means to conduct successful evaluations.
Liliana and Rita O’Sullivan are presenting a Coffee Break Webinar next week (March 31) on this very topic! Sign up here: http://comm.eval.org/EVAL/coffee_break_webinars/Home/Default.aspx
Hi Liliana
I really like your phrase: “realistic evaluation scope”.
A lot of what we are doing in our empowerment evaluation in Arkansas (tobacco prevention project), is to make sure folks establish a realistic scope and realistic goals. Otherwise the process can be depressing because they are not achievable, however, if they are realistic they can be modified up or down a bit as deemed appropriate but “in the ball park” so to speak.
Thanks for highlighting that aspect that I think is shared by collaborative, participatory, and empowerment evaluation.
– David