View article

Perhaps it is best to start out by describing what this paper is not going to do. It will not provide an overview of evaluation, describe major approaches, delineate the broad range of available methodologies or provide examples of evaluations relevant to the topic of character development (CD) programs. Put more succinctly, we do not intend to characterize how evaluation is done. The mainstream literature on evaluation addresses all of these topics far better than we could hope to do here. We assume that either the reader is familiar with that literature or, if interest so motivates, will be able to avail themselves of it at any point. Instead this paper hopes to make a more general argument about how the endeavor of character development might think about evaluation, how it fits into their work, and what needs to happen in order to sustain it. Along the way we hope to introduce the reader to a broader view of evaluation, not just as something that is applied to a program or at a program level but as an endeavor that needs to be integral to the ecologies and systems within which programs occur. This macro-level view is driven by several tectonic shifts in high-level thinking in evaluation (and many other fields) over the past few decades associated with the rise of ecological and systems thinking, the integration of evolutionary theory into applied social research methodology, and the rise of integrated global computer technology in the form of the internet. These forces are moving us away from the traditional focus of evaluation at the program level and situating traditional program evaluation within a longer-term evolution of program theory and practice. It is …