Discussant: Thomas Bradbury

Workshop Leaders: Beth S. Russell, Amy Lewin, Ghaffar Ali Hurtado Choque

Evaluation science and its potential for useful application and meaningful impact on the families served by community partners continues to evolve. However, the field’s origins in bench science and medicine continue to create a tension for evaluators between academic expectations of rigor, and programmatic focus on utility and feasibility. The balancing of these tensions, and efforts to improve the representation of marginalized segments of the population in the evidence base, leads to epistemological questions about the perspectives and agendas that underpin evaluation. This workshop critically examines these issues and aims to: 1) describe the primary limitations of traditional methods in meeting current programmatic needs, 2) review some emerging evaluation paradigms that address these limitations, and 3) offer recommendations for creating a more expansive evidence base.