Alternative Evaluation Designs:
Implications from Systems Thinking and Complexity Theory

Instructor: Dr. Michael Quinn Patton

Description: In a new book entitled Getting to Maybe (2006, Random House), the authors note that the trick in any great social project-from the global fight against AIDS to working to eradicate poverty in a single city-is to stop looking at the discrete elements and start trying to understand the complex relationships among them. We think evaluation is an important resource for helping programmers and other change agents to analyze and understand these dynamics.

The field of evaluation already has a rich variety of contrasting models, competing purposes, alternatives methods, and divergent techniques that can be applied to projects and organizational innovations that vary in scope, complexity, comprehensiveness, boundedness, and so on. The challenge, then, is to match evaluation to the nature of the initiative being evaluated. This means that we need to have options beyond the traditional approaches (e.g., the linear logic models, experimental designs) when faced with systems change dynamics and initiatives that display the characteristics of emergent complexities. This course will focus on learning what perspectives such as Systems Thinking and Complexity Theory (Nonlinear Dynamics/Chaos Theory) can offer for alternative evaluation designs and uses in support of the matching of an evaluation to the systems nature of the project and situation that are the focus of developmental evaluation. It will also examine what role evaluators have in contributing to program effectiveness, i.e., do they bear any responsibility, beyond evaluation implementation, for evaluation use and program improvement. Participants will receive a copy of the instructor's text: Utilization-Focused Evaluation (Sage 1996).

Certificates: CAEP IIC.d