Introduction
Today, more than ever before, shifting social, economic, and political dynamics has forced policy makers, program-developers and stakeholders to undertake a continuous assessment of their programs or risk failure. In the medical field, the need is more immediate especially after the realization that critical information is required on a constant basis to meet the obligation of offering effective services (Posavac & Carey, 2007). An evaluation, according to Fink (1995), can be termed as a thorough investigation of a program’s essential characteristics and merits. Posavac & Carey (2007) defines program evaluation as a collection of methodologies, proficiencies, and sensitivities necessary to establish whether a human service is required and likely to be utilized, whether the service is adequately exhaustive to meet the unmet objectives or needs identified, whether the service is disseminated as initially planned, and whether the service really does assist people in need at a realistic cost and without undesirable side effects. This paper purposes to discuss some of the underlying issues related to program evaluation, including its purpose, importance, and models.
Purpose and Importance of Program Evaluation
According to Posavac & Carey (2007), program evaluation activities serve the holistic purpose of contributing to the provision of effective and quality services to people who require them. Program evaluation, as postulated by the authors, contributes to effective and quality services by generating feedback from program activities and outcomes to professionals charged with the responsibility of implementing and altering the programs to fit the needs of people on the ground. Indeed, feedback is fundamentally important for effective delivery of human service programs, and delayed feedback, which may not be inherently associated with the behavior under examination, is not very informative.
The feedback and outcomes generated by evaluation activities allows program-developers a chance to assess the immediate needs of the people targeted by the intervention, and serve as a metric of measuring how the programs ought to be executed to meet those needs. Still, these variables serves as appraisal tools used to assess the achievement of purposively formulated goals, and also as analytical tools used to perform a comparative analysis of the level of achieved outcomes against the costs involved (Posavac & Carey, 2007; Royse et al., 2010 ). The above program activities serve to provide objective data from which to develop and implement program improvements or make prudent choices among feasible programs.
The importance of program evaluation to an organization can never be underestimated. Among other things, an evaluation provides formative feedback that inarguably assists the organization to guide the program during implementation phase (Fink, 1995). In the medical field, the formative evaluations can assist an organization to strengthen its plans for effective service delivery in order to advance the outcomes and merits of programs or enhance their efficiency (Posavac & Carey, 2007). Second, program evaluation benefits the organization by providing summative information demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of the program towards achieving its stated goals and objectives (Royse et al., 2010). This information is principally required to create an enabling environment through which policy-makers can optimize the outcomes, overall efficiency, and quality of the program. Such evaluations, according to Posavac & Carey (2007), serves to determine whether a program should be commenced, continued, terminated, or selected from two or more viable alternatives.
Third, program evaluation assists organizations to monitor and maintain the quality of the program through constant assessment of feedback (Posavac & Carey, 2007). Indeed, the monitoring function is critically important since it assists the organization to authenticate that an effective program remains effective. Additionally, monitoring assists organizations to isolate challenges that arises when the social environment changes. Still, organizations undertake program evaluation “to appraise the achievement of a project’s goals and objectives and the extent of its impacts and costs” (Fink, 1995, p. 2). Lastly, policy-makers within the organization may undertake a program evaluation if there arises need to make a decision relating to a particular intervention within the program.
Types of Program Evaluation Models
According to Posavac & Carey (2007), a number of divergent models to evaluation have been developed to guide the planning and execution of program evaluations. Below, a brief description of five of the most common types of program evaluation is offered.
- Objectives-Based Evaluation: Approach accentuates working with clearly affirmed program goals and objectives so that the extent to which program interventions have been able to achieve the set goals and objectives can be evaluated (Posavac & Carey, 2007).
- Goal-Free Evaluation: in an attempt to avoid evaluator’s bias on a program’s capacity to achieve the stated goals and objectives, this model study the program as initially administered, the employees, the customers, the settings, and official records to identify and evaluate all the positive and negative outcomes of the program.
- Fiscal Evaluation: This model is firmly rooted in the rationale that provision of services require financial and material resources, and that costs arising from program activities can never be ignored, thus an evaluation of the financial investment required to commence and support a program must be made in addition to appraising the return on that investment (Posavac & Carey, 2007).
- An Improvement-Focused Approach: This model puts program improvement processes as the main focus rather than specific methodologies or techniques
- Accountability Model: Used in the public sector, this model revolves around the notion that publicly funded programs must in earnest allocate resources to the activities that were initially authorized when the programs were approved (Posavac & Carey, 2007).
Description of the Improvement-Focused Approach
This model lays particular emphasis on assessing areas in which a particular program needs improvements rather than appraising specific methodologies. The basic principle of the model, according to Posavac & Carey (2007), is that improvements can be initiated in programs when inconsistencies are discovered between what is observed and what was originally intended, projected, or planned. Consequently, evaluators utilizing this model must assist program staff to ascertain inconsistencies between program goals and the requirements of people targeted by the interventions, between program execution and program plans, between anticipations of the targeted population and the services that are realistically delivered by the program, or between the tangible outcomes attained and the anticipated outcomes (Posavac & Carey, 2007).
Many evaluations seek to find new synergies towards improving a program. As such, evaluating a particular program for inconsistencies between what has occurred as initially planned and what has not, and if the anticipated needs of the target population were adequately met or not, offers an enabling environment for policy-makers and program-developers to seek to effect necessary improvements (Fink, 1995; Posavac & Carey, 2007). This evaluation approach also looks into the abilities and skills of program staff to effectively execute the program with a view to recommending more training if such a need arises. More importantly, the model evaluates if the operational dynamics of the program are in line with its conceptual basis or whether improvements are needed. Many analysts believe the improvement-focused model best meets the standards essential for effective evaluation since it does not only adequately serves the needs of stakeholders, but it offers objective information and alternative perspectives to the professionals charged with the difficult task of executing programs.
Conclusion
This paper has discussed, at length, the main purposes of program evaluation, its practical importance to organizations, and the various models used in program evaluation. It has been demonstrated that evaluations are initiated to, among other things, provide stakeholders with feedback and outcomes of the interventions channeled through the program (Posavac & Carey, 2007). The feedback is intended to improve the program’s outcomes or discontinue it if no tangible benefits are in the offing. As such, it can be safely argued that the improvement-focused model represents one of the best approaches for undertaking a program evaluation for the purposes of appraising feedback and perceived outcomes.
Reference List
Fink, A. (1995). Evaluation for Education and Psychology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.
Posavac, E.J., & Carey, R.J. (2007). Program evaluation: Methods and case studies (7th Ed.). Pearson. Web.
Royse, D., Thyer, B.A., & Padgett, D.K. (2010). Program Evaluation: An Introduction. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.