Stakeholder Participation for the Purpose of Helping Ensure Evaluation Validity: Bridging the Gap Between Collaborative and Non-collaborative Evaluations

Abstract

Collaborative evaluations, in which program stakeholders participate extensively, typically are conducted for the primary purpose of enhancing the use of evaluation findings, and non-collaborative evaluations, in which stakeholders do not participate extensively, typically are conducted for the primary purpose of generating valid findings. This article shows how the gap can be bridged between these two types of evaluations. The article synthesizes, and elaborates on, a small body of recent research that showed that considerable interaction with stakeholders during the evaluation of small education programs helped achieve the raison d’etre of non-collaborative evaluations-that is, to enhance validity. It is also shown that theories and methods of stakeholder participation for the purpose of enhancing validity, which by and large have been ignored in the collaborative evaluation literature, can improve the quality of collaborative studies.