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My name is Karen Kirkhart, and I am now an elder in the evaluation profession. I was active in both Evaluation Network and the Evaluation Research Society before they merged to form AEA. I have been active in AEA since its founding, and I served as President in 1994. I have spent decades pondering two related topics in evaluation: validity and influence. Creating accurate, trustworthy understandings, and taking action to make a difference. We evaluators have always wanted to use our craft to inform decisions and advance social betterment. In fact, the Use TIG was one of the original topical interest groups of the AEA, and the wisdom our TIG has never been more relevant than now.

Good morning and happy Tuesday! I am Doris Espelien, professional nerd (like you) and founder of Bricolage Consulting in St. Paul, MN. I’ve had the privilege of learning from and working with people who allowed me to pursue this work my own way, and I’m excited to share with you some insights that have come along the way.

My name is Élyse McCall-Thomas, PhD Candidate at the University of Ottawa. In this post, I reflect on how working outside traditional timelines and closely with programs can facilitate the use of evaluation findings.

We are Michael Quinn Patton and Charmagne E. Campbell-Patton, from Utilization-Focused Evaluation, here to welcome you to Use & Influence of Evaluation week here at AEA365. We are a father-daughter team with more than 65 years of experience in evaluation consulting across a range of contexts.

Hello, AEA365 readers! We are evaluators and technical assistance (TA) practitioners who have spent much of our careers helping organizations put evidence-based programs and practices into action. Over the years, we’ve come to see evaluation and TA not as separate activities, but as deeply interconnected practices: good TA requires us to continually collect evidence, learn from implementation, and adapt.

Hello, I am Titilayo Ogunbambi, a community psychologist and evaluator affiliated with National Louis University, Chicago, Illinois. I spent the past decade supporting survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV), engaging in prevention efforts, and evaluating social, cultural, and relational drivers influencing IPV across different contexts. More recently, I had the opportunity to examine the challenges and barriers impeding IPV help-seeking and the use of available formal services among African immigrant women in the United States by interviewing frontline service providers, advocates, and coalition members at the United African Organization in Chicago. The findings inform a culturally responsive framework for co-creating IPV services (See Figure 1 below) and provide evaluators with practical ways to understand reasons why existing systems fall short of addressing IPV and what is needed to design programs that genuinely meet the needs of vulnerable communities.

Hi! I’m Sheila B. Robinson, Ed.D., owner of Custom Professional Learning, LLC. While I’m a program evaluator, my main lane is helping people design rave worthy workshops, courses, trainings, and meetings. I’m passionate about high-quality teaching and learning and bring that lens to all my work.

I’m Gene Shackman, Applied Sociologist and author of the Beginners Guide to Evaluation. Welcome to part two about non-probability sampling. In the first blog, I talked about quota sampling, used when administering a survey. The other methods are used after the survey has already been administered.

Hi! We are Andrew Grillo-Hill, Joshua Valcarcel, Kimberly Nguyen, Karen Melchior, Corynn Del Core, and Rasha Elsayed, the N3 evaluation team within WestEd’s STEM Evaluation Unit. The STEM Evaluation Unit serves as external evaluators for dozens of STEM education projects and programs each year, including for multiple NASA Science Mission Directorate Science Activation 2.0 projects, or SciAct for short.

Hello! I’m Arthur Hernández, an evaluator and educator whose work focuses on evaluation, community engagement, and the forms of knowledge we authorize as credible. I want to address a persistent and perhaps unvoiced misunderstanding: the idea that “lived experience” is either redundant or somehow a threat to scholarly expertise.