Collaborative Evaluation systematically invites and engages stakeholders in program evaluation planning and implementation. Unlike "distanced" evaluation approaches, which reject stakeholder participation as evaluation team members, Collaborative Evaluation assumes that active, on-going engagement between evaluators and program staff,…

Focus groups have an established history in applied research and evaluation. The fundamental methods of the focus group technique have been well discussed, as have their potential advantages. Less guidance tends to be provided regarding the analysis of data resulting from focus groups or how to organize and defend conclusions drawn from the…

Needs assessment (NA) is generally based on the discrepancy between two conditions--the desired and present states. To date, there has not been an extensive research regarding a number of subtle problems in discrepancy analysis. One such example is missing data for one or both the two states. This leads to highly varied item "n's" for calculating…