Process Evaluation

History

Under the presidential administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson during the 1960s and 1970s, the War on Poverty and Great Society agendas yielded numerous large-scale, federally funded programs (e.g., Head Start, Job Corps, and Community Action Program) to promote social reform in the United States. From 1950 to 1979, funding for social programs grew by 600% after inflation. Increased economic investment contributed to a desire for empirical confirmation that program outcomes were meeting expectations, leading to the emergence of government-mandated evaluations.

Despite optimism that evaluation would systematically identify effective programs for adoption or continuation and ineffective programs for termination, the majority of the War on Poverty and Great Society programs showed disappointing effects. Furthermore, explanations as to why desired results were not achieved proved impossible to ascertain. Evaluators typically assessed program outcomes to determine the extent to which objectives had been reached, without consideration for implementation fidelity. Implementation fidelity (also referred to as integrity), or the degree to which programs are carried out as intended by their developers, may moderate the relation between program exposure and intended outcomes. To gain insight as to the reasoning behind program effects or lack thereof, evaluators soon moved beyond “black box” methodology to incorporate process evaluations into their evaluation plans.

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the number of published studies that included process evaluation components had grown exponentially. Researchers [Page 1304]have attributed the proliferation of process evaluation literature to the execution of increasingly complex social and behavioral interventions incorporating multiple levels, sites, and target groups. Moreover, process evaluations collect both quantitative data (e.g., questionnaires and population statistics) and qualitative data (e.g., semistructured interviews, focus groups, and direct observations), and a waxing appreciation for the value of qualitative research in the scientific community facilitated the publication of research using such methods.

The demand for program evaluation has continued to grow as funding agencies (e.g., federal, state, and local government, nonprofit organizations, and private entities) become increasingly interested in understanding how their investments have been used and what they have produced. In some cases and places, program evaluations have been incorporated into the law; the Chief Financial Officers Act, signed into law by President George H. W. Bush in 1990 to improve governmental management of finances, requires U.S. federal agencies to report on program evaluations.

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