Utilization-Focused Evaluation: The New Century Text

Can evaluation be used to improve programs? Can it contribute to program effectiveness? Do evaluators bear any responsibility for evaluation use and program improvement? This skillfully honed revision by master storyteller and evaluator Michael Quinn Patton grapples with the answers to these questions and provides the most comprehensive review and integration ever done of the vast literature on evaluation use and practice. Earlier editions are popular with more than 26,000 students of evaluation as a core or supplemental text.

This entirely rewritten edition offers readers a full-fledged evaluation text from identifying primary users of an evaluation to focusing the evaluation, making methods decisions, analyzing data, and presenting findings. Both practical and theoretical, Utilization-Focused Evaluation: The New Century Text, Third Edition tells how to conduct program evaluations and why to conduct them in the manner prescribed.

Each chapter contains a review of the relevant literature and actual case examples to illustrate major points. Finally, the book offers a definite point of view developed from observing much of what has passed for program evaluation that has not been very useful: Program evaluation ought to be useful and something different must be done if evaluation is to be useful.

Thought-provoking topics new to this edition are:
- Using participatory evaluation processes to change a program′s culture and build a learning organization.
- Alternative evaluator roles connected to varying situations and diverse evaluation purposes.
- Getting started: generating commitment to use.
- How evaluators can nurture results-oriented, reality-testing leadership in programs and organizations.
- Specific techniques for managing the power dynamics of working with primary intended users as well as evaluation stakeholders.
- A paradigm of choices beyond the qualitative-quantitative methods debate.
- Concrete and practical approaches for facilitating evaluation processes and working with diverse stakeholders.
- Development evaluation fully elaborated.
- Utilization-focused evaluation and the Experimenting Society (tribute to Donald T. Campbell).
- Ethical issues in utilization-focused evaluation.
- Fourteen fundamental premises of utilization-focused evaluation that are completely revised and updated.

In addition, Patton has supplemented the book with the following pedagogical features to enhance your, and your students′, understanding of the concepts:
- More than 50 new exhibits for teaching and training use.
- Menus developed as special tools for working with stakeholders in selecting evaluation decision options.
- New examples and ideas for useful presentations and graphics.
- Plus, the stories and parables you′′ve come to expect--and love--from Patton.

Written with humor, a soft touch, and the sound advice of two decades of experience, Utilization-Focused Evaluation: The New Century Text, Third Edition provides an overall framework and concrete advice for conducing useful evaluations.

Michael Quinn Patton is author of more than a dozen books on evaluation including Qualitative Research & Evaluation Methods, 4th ed (2015), Blue Marble Evaluation (2020), Principles-Focused Evaluation (2018), Facilitating Evaluation (2018) and Developmental Evaluation (2011). Based in Minnesota, he was on the faculty of the University of Minnesota for 18 years and is a former president of the American Evaluation Association (AEA). Michael is a recipient of the Alva and Gunnar Myrdal Evaluation Practice Award, the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Evaluation Theory Award, and the Research on Evaluation Award, all from AEA He has also received the Lester F. Ward Distinguished Contribution to Applied and Clinical Sociology Award from the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology. In 2021 he received the first Transformative Evaluator Award from EvalYouth. He is an active speaker, trainer, and workshop presenter who has conducted applied research and evaluation on a broad range of issues and has worked with organizations and programs at the international, national, state, provincial, and local levels. Michael has three children―a musician, an engineer, and an evaluator―and four grandchildren. When not evaluating, he enjoys exploring the woods and rivers of Minnesota, where he lives.