Research on the utilizations of evaluations was based on a followup of 20 Federal health program evaluations to assess the degree to which the evaluations had been used and to identify the factors that affected varying degrees of utilization. Interviews were conducted with project officers or people they identified as decisionmakers who would utilize information in the evaluation reports. Two major themes emerged from the study. First, it was found that much of the evaluation literature has considerably overestimated the kind of impact evaluation research is likely to have. Second, the importance of the personal factor in evaluation research, particularly the utilization process, has been considerably underestimated. The two themes are directly linked. The impact of evaluation research is most often experienced as a reduction in the uncertainty faced by individual decisionmakers as they attempt to deal with the complexity of programing reality. It must be assimilated and fitted into a contextual whole. Energetic and interested people in government can and do use evaluation research, not for making decisions with immediate, concrete, and visible impacts, but in a more subtle, clarifying, reinforcing, and reorienting way. Evaluators, then, might do well to spend less time lamenting their lack of visible impact on major decisions and more of their time providing relevant information to those key persons whose thoughts and actions, to a substantial extent, determine the general direction in the evolutionary process of program development. It is in consciously working with such decisionmakers to answer their questions that the utilization of evaluation research can be enhanced. (TA)