Program Evaluation: A Primer for Effectiveness, Quality, and Value

by Arlene Fink

This timely, unique, and insightful book provides students and practitioners with the tools and skills needed to evaluate social and policy programs across a range of disciplines—from public health to social work to education—enabling the allocation of scarce human and financial resources to advance the health and well-being of individuals and populations.

The chapters are organized according to the main tasks involved in conducting an evaluation to produce unbiased evidence of program effectiveness, quality, and value. The chapters include methods for selecting and justifying evaluation questions or hypotheses, designing evaluations, sampling participants, selecting information sources, and ensuring reliable and valid measurement. The final section of the book is focused around managing and analyzing data and transparently reporting the results in written and oral form. The book features international case studies throughout, covers quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method approaches, and is also informed by new online methods developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the book’s unique features is a focus on international standards for conducting ethical evaluations and avoiding research misconduct.

Also featuring checklists, example forms, and summaries of the key ideas and topics, this very practical book is essential reading for students in the social, behavioral, and health sciences, and will be a key resource for professionals in the field.

Kindle Edition

Published December 22, 2023

About the author

Arlene Fink (Ph.D.) is Professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, and president of the Langley Research Institute. Her main interests include evaluation and survey research and the conduct of research literature reviews as well as the evaluation of their quality. Dr. Fink has conducted scores of literature reviews and evaluation studies in public health, medicine, and education. She is on the faculty of UCLA's Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program and is a scientific and evaluation advisor to UCLA's Gambling Studies and IMPACT (Improving Access, Counseling & Treatment for Californians with Prostate Cancer) programs. She consults nationally and internationally for agencies such as L'institut de Promotion del la Prevention Secondaire en Addictologie (IPPSA) in Paris, France, and Peninsula Health in Victoria, Australia. Professor Fink has taught and lectured extensively all over the world and is the author of over 135 peer-reviewed articles and 15 textbooks.