Empowerment Evaluation Principles in Practice

What principles should guide an empowerment evaluation? And how can these principles actually be put into practice? One of the primary tasks in an empowerment evaluation (EE) is to increase the capacity of program stakeholders to plan, implement, and evaluate their own programs. This book presents the most current formulation of the 10 principles of EE and provides professionals and students with the tools to put these principles into practice. Through case studies of diverse evaluation projects--including community health foundation initiatives, school district programs, and a $15 million corporate program aimed at bridging the digital divide--the founder and leading proponents of EE clarify key concepts and discuss important lessons learned. Coverage includes how to balance program improvement efforts with accountability requirements; how EE can be used to guide standards-based work; how to use EE in a learning organization; the differences among empowerment, collaborative, and participatory evaluation; and much more.

David M. Fetterman, PhD, is president and CEO of Fetterman and Associates, an international evaluation consulting firm, and the founder of empowerment evaluation. Dr. Fetterman has worked in more than 17 countries--in South African townships and Native American reservations, as well as in Silicon Valley tech firms, including Google and Hewlett-Packard--and has 25 years of experience at Stanford University, serving as a School of Education faculty member, the School of Medicine director of evaluation, and a senior member of the University administration. He currently serves as a faculty member at Pacifica Graduate Institute and Claremont Graduate University. Dr. Fetterman is past president of the American Evaluation Association (AEA) and the Council on Anthropology and Education of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). He is a recipient of honors including the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Evaluation Theory Award and the Alva and Gunnar Myrdal Evaluation Practice Award from the AEA; the President’s Award from the AAA; the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Research on Evaluation Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association; and the Award for Excellence in Research from the Mensa Foundation. He is the author or editor of numerous books.

Abraham Wandersman is Professor of Psychology at the University of South Carolina/n-/Columbia and was interim Co-Director of the Institute for Families in Society at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Wandersman performs research and program evaluation on citizen participation in community organizations and coalitions and on interagency collaboration. He is currently co-principal investigator on a participatory research study of an empowerment evaluation system, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and is working on a project for the program implementation and dissemination branch of the CDC center for injury prevention to facilitate a process and develop a framework on "how to bring what has been shown to work in child maltreatment prevention and youth violence prevention into more widespread practice." Dr. Wandersman is a coeditor of Empowerment Evaluation: Knowledge and Tools for Self-Assessment and Accountability, and has authored or edited many other books and articles. In 1998, he received the Myrdal Award for Cumulative Contributions to Evaluation Practice from the American Evaluation Association. In 2000, he was elected President of Division 27 of the American Psychological Association (Community Psychology): The Society for Community Research and Action.