The Evidence Book

Knowledge grows as ideas are tested against each other. Agreement is not resolved simply by naming concepts but in the dialectical process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. There are many echoes of these debates in The Evidence Book. The contributors make claims for both practitioner wisdom and the voice of experience. Against this is posed the authority of experimental science and the randomized controlled trial.The contributors are concerned, in their own ways, with collecting, ranking, and analyzing evidence and using this to deliver evaluations. As an expert group, they are aware that the concept of evidence has been increasingly important in the last decade. As with other concepts, it too often escapes precise definition. Despite this, the growing importance of evidence has been advocated with enthusiasm by supporters who see it as a way of increasing the effectiveness and quality of decisions and of professional life.The willingness to engage in evidence-based policy and the means to do so is heavily constrained by economic, political, and cultural climates. This book is a marvelously comprehensive and utterly unique treatise on evidence-based policy. It is a wide-ranging contribution to the field of evaluation.

Olaf Rieper has an M.A. in sociology and a Ph.D. from the Copenhagen Business School. He is Director of Research at the Danish Institute of Governmental Research (AKF). He has conducted evaluations and research on public programs for Danish and Norwegian government agencies and for the EU Commission. He has been visiting scholar at the School of Social Work, University of Michigan, and has worked at the Centre for European Evaluation Expertice (C3E) in Lyon. He has written books and guidelines on evaluation methodology and research methods and was the first elected chairman of the Danish Evaluation Society. Frans L. Leeuw is the Director of the Justice Research, Statistics and Information Center, affiliated to the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Professor of Law, Public Policy and Social Science Research at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He is a sociologist (Ph.D, Leyden University, 1983). Earlier he was Professor of Evaluation Studies at Utrecht University, Director of the Performance Auditing and Evaluation Department of the Dutch National Audit Office, Dean of the Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty of the Netherlands Open University, Chief Inspector for Higher Education in the Netherlands and associate professor of policy studies at Leyden University. He has been one of the founding persons of the European Evaluation Society EES and past president of this organization. Currently he is President of the Dutch Evaluation Society. He is a Faculty member of the IPDET program. He has worked for the World Bank, the EU and for many agencies and ministries of the Dutch government. Tom Ling is Director for Evaluation and Audit at RAND Europe. He studied Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University and completed a PhD in Government at Essex University. He joined RAND following four years as Senior Research Fellow at the National Audit Office in the UK. He has worked on evaluation projects with the European Commission, UK Government Departments, the National Audit Office, The Health Foundation and many others. He has published widely on evaluation, accountability and related topics. He is currently working on a Public Audit Handbook, a multi-site program evaluation of quality improvement in healthcare, and an analysis of the Impact Assessment process in the European Commission. He is Professor of Public Policy (Emeritus) at Anglia Ruskin University where he contributes to post[1]graduate teaching.