Qualitative Methods
Colleen Graber, n/a
Chief Operating Officer
Public Policy Associates, United States
Location: Room 102
Abstract Information: Advisory groups—intentionally formed and given agency to apply their lived experiences and expertise—contribute to a responsive, actionable evaluation or research study. This session will provide skill-building on how to create and work with an advisory group at the various project stages, from defining research questions to data interpretation. The session will include discussion of group purpose, the nuances of member selection and recruiting, and group facilitation techniques that promote inclusion and two-way learning. We will discuss key considerations like power dynamics, peer relationships, supports, and the evaluator’s role as facilitator and synthesizer of inputs.
Based on real-world experience with groups of a range of compositions and purposes, this session offers practical advice and the opportunity to try out techniques and plan for an advisory group. Attendees will leave better prepared to establish advisory group members as main characters in an exciting, gratifying evaluation story.
Relevance Statement: Advisory groups are a popular feature of evaluations that seek to include community members, partner organizations, practitioners, and/or program customers in the process of understanding an initiative or a program’s outcomes. Done well, an advisory group genuinely informs the evaluation design, data collection process, results analysis, and recommendations. It can serve to empower those affected by the program under study and yield a more meaningful evaluation. Done poorly, an advisory group is a token evaluation element without influence. Such a group could perpetuate negative relationships and impair an evaluation.
Other fields also use advisory groups, such as higher education institutions that seek perspective on program investments and curricula enhancements or health care efforts that utilize experts to help coach implementations of systems change for patient outcomes improvements. As discussed in the Evaluation Advisory Groups issue of New Directions for Evaluation (December 2012), the literature about these types of groups is limited and are not rooted in a formal evidence base. Nonetheless, they serve an important consultatory role, with practical implications for the evaluator.
Advisory groups can appropriately be part of participatory evaluation, culturally responsive evaluation, and other theoretical evaluation approaches. In Evaluation Roots: Theory Influencing Practice, edited by Alkin and Christie, categorize evaluation practices into three sections of an illustrative tree: use, methods, and valuing. Depending on how advisory groups are positioned in an evaluation, they can contribute toward any of these “branches.”
The proposed session helps prepare evaluators to approach advisory groups with intentionality and offers the essential tools to carry them out in alignment with the relevant Program Evaluation Standards (U1, U2, U6, U8, F3, P1) and the professional competency of professional practice.