Evaluation Research

Evaluation and the Experimenting Society

Edward Suchman (1967) began his seminal text on evaluation research with the observation that “one of the most appealing ideas of our century is the notion that science can be put to work to provide solutions to social problems” (p. 1). Visionaries such as Donald T. Campbell (1991) conceptualized evaluation as the centerpiece of a new kind of society: the experimenting society. He gave voice to this vision in his 1971 address to the American Psychological Association (1991):

Historical Context

Evaluation in the United States traces its formal professional roots to the federal projects spawned by the Great Society legislation of the 1960s, which were aimed at nothing less than the elimination of poverty. The creation of large-scale federal health programs, including community mental health centers, was coupled with a mandate for evaluation, often at a level of 1% to 3% of program budgets. Other major programs were created in housing, employment, services integration, community planning, urban renewal, and welfare. The rapid growth of social action programs created a demand for systematic empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of government programs. Passage of the U.S. Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965 contributed greatly to more comprehensive approaches to evaluation. The massive influx of federal money aimed at desegregation, innovation, compensatory education, greater equality of [Page 338]opportunity, teacher training, and higher student achievement was accompanied by calls for evaluation data to assess the effects on the nation’s children of various programs.

Program evaluation as a distinct field of professional practice was born of two lessons from this period of large-scale social experimentation and government intervention: first, the realization that there is not enough money to do all the things that need doing; and second, even if there were enough money, it takes more than money to solve complex human and social problems. Because not everything can be done, there must be a basis for deciding which things are worth doing. Evaluation research was charged with informing decision making by bringing credible data to bear on judgments about effectiveness.

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