Evaluation in the Face of Uncertainty

Unexpected events during an evaluation all too often send evaluators into crisis mode. This insightful book provides a systematic framework for diagnosing, anticipating, accommodating, and reining in costs of evaluation surprises.

“"Will help evaluators seeking to avoid the pitfalls of complicated and complex situations and evaluations. The book provides evaluation planning advice that can prevent or mitigate the most common and preventable kinds of evaluation surprises."-- American Journal of Evaluation”

"If your world, including your evaluation work, is often complex, uncertain, and unpredictable, you have a fellow traveler and real-world guide in Morell. He applies more than three decades of experience to the challenges of distinguishing what can and cannot be foreseen, anticipating the unexpected, and dealing with the unforeseeable. This book draws on concrete cases, expert wisdom, practitioner experiences, scholarly knowledge, and organizational theory to explore evaluation approaches and methods that are agile, flexible, emergent, and responsive. Morell's voice is personable, his guidance realistic, and his insights important. You'll be surprised how much better you can get at anticipating and learning from surprises." - Michael Quinn Patton, Director, Utilization-Focused Evaluation, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA "Insightful and provocative. Though Morell writes from the stance of an evaluator, his descriptions of 'things that go awry' apply to a wide swath of research methodologies. The idea that all research projects encounter unanticipated or unintended outcomes is aptly illustrated through a variety of case studies; for example, No Child Left Behind evaluation studies, health impacts of central heating, and outcomes of abolishing user fees in health clinics in Niger. The cases provide ample evidence of why things went awry and how unanticipated or unintended outcomes may be predicted and controlled. This book would be ideal for graduate-level courses on research design or program evaluation, either as a textbook or a supplement." - James E. Gruber, Department of Behavioral Sciences, University of Michigan--Dearborn, USA "This clearly written, well-organized book presents a lexicon of the surprises that occur in evaluation practice, both in the program - how it unfolds between planning and completion of the evaluation - and in the process of data collection and analysis. Morell outlines a structure for understanding what these surprises are, where they occur in the programming and evaluation process, why they are inevitable, and how they can (or sometimes cannot) be foreseen. The book provides practitioners with a systematic way of diagnosing and possibly even anticipating surprises, and explains how to accommodate them." - Deborah Wasserman, Principal Consultant, PERSolutions: Program Evaluation and Research, Columbus, Ohio, USA

Jonathan A. Morell, Senior Policy Analyst, Vector Research Center, TechTeam Government Solutions, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

Unexpected events during an evaluation all too often send evaluators into crisis mode. This insightful book provides a systematic framework for diagnosing, anticipating, accommodating, and reining in costs of evaluation surprises.

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