Summary of Week 4

This week you have critiqued conventional evaluation approaches that focus on quantitative data and looked at some qualitative methods and approaches, including some participatory and arts-based approaches to evaluation. Evaluation is about generating evidence of practice and how effective it is. But it is also about making judgements about the value of the evidence and the knowledge it gives rise to.

Hopefully, this journey through evaluation has broadened your understanding of the range of approaches available, and how they can be mixed and matched to create a more customised and bespoke evaluation. In this way the story behind the numbers can be told, making for a more holistic evaluation that captures the expected and the unexpected, the surprises and the accidents. This provides a fresh understanding of development interventions, whereby they are less interventions and more a process of interaction and discovery (Copesatake and Williams, 2014,p.149)