Performance Evaluation: Proven Approaches for Improving Program and Organizational Performance

CONCLUSION

This chapter has covered a wide (though not completely exhaustive) range of data collection approaches and methods available to evaluators and other investigators. The data collected have to be representative of reality, and thus what you do and how you go about collecting data is central to good evaluation. If inappropriate or invalid methods for a situation are used, the data collected—and, in turn, the interpretations and recommendations—will be considered invalid. Rigor, of course, is not the same thing as inefficient use of time or overly complex data analysis. Instead, rigor refers to the care and attention paid to all decisions related to the selection, use, and analysis of data collection tools and the resulting data. The credibility ...