Theory & Practice
Empowerment Evaluation in Theory
Empowerment evaluation is an innovative approach to evaluation. It has been
adopted in higher education, government, inner-city public education, nonprofit
corporations, and foundations throughout the United States and abroad. Although
it can be applied to individuals, organizations, communities, and societies
or cultures, the focus is usually on programs. A wide range of programs use
empowerment evaluation, including substance abuse prevention, adolescent pregnancy
prevention, doctoral programs, and accelerated schools.
Empowerment evaluation is the use of evaluation concepts, techniques, and findings
to foster improvement and self-determination. It employs both qualitative and
quantitative methodologies. Empowerment evaluation has an unambiguous value
orientation. It is designed to help people help themselves and improve their
programs using a form of self-evaluation and reflection. Program participants—including
clients—conduct their own evaluations; an outside evaluator often serves
as a coach or additional facilitator depending on internal program capabilities.
Empowerment evaluation is necessarily a collaborative group activity, not an
individual pursuit. An evaluator does not and cannot empower anyone; people
empower themselves, often with assistance and coaching. This process is fundamentally
democratic in the sense that it invites (if not demands) participation, examining
issues of concern to the entire community in an open forum.
As a result, the context changes: the assessment of a program's value and worth
is not the endpoint of the evaluation—as it often is in traditional evaluation—but
is part of an ongoing process of program improvement. This new context acknowledges
a simple but often overlooked truth: that merit and worth are not static values.
By internalizing and institutionalizing self-evaluation processes and practices,
a dynamic and responsive approach to evaluation can be developed to accommodate
these shifts.
There are several pragmatic steps involved in helping others learn to evaluate
their own programs: (1) taking stock or determining where the program stands,
including strengths and weaknesses; (2) focusing on establishing goals (determining
where you want to go in the future with an explicit emphasis on program improvement);
(3) developing strategies and helping participants determine their own strategies
to accomplish program goals and objectives; and (4) helping program participants
determine the type of evidence required to document progress credibly toward
their goals.
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Further Reading
Fetterman, D. M. (in press). Empowerment evaluation. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage.
Fetterman, D. M. (1994). Empowerment evaluation. Presidential Address.
Evaluation Practice, 15(1), 1–15.
Fetterman, D. M. (1994). Steps of empowerment evaluation: From California
to Cape Town. Evaluation and Program Planning, 17(3), 305–313.
Fetterman, D. M., Kaftarian, S., and Wandersman, A. (1995). Empowerment
evaluation: Knowledge and tools for self-assessment and accountability.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation. (1994). The
program evaluation standards. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
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Many elements must be in place for empowerment evaluation to be effective and
credible. Participants must have the latitude to experiment, taking both risks
and responsibility for their actions. An environment conducive to sharing successes
and failures is also essential.
An outside evaluator who is charged with monitoring the process can help keep
the effort credible, useful, and on track, providing additional rigor, reality
checks, and quality controls throughout the evaluation. The evaluator is a coequal
in this endeavor, not a superior and not a servant; as a critical friend, the
evaluator can question shared biases or “group think.”
As is the case in traditional evaluation, everyone is accountable in one fashion
or another and thus has an interest or agenda to protect. A school district
may have a five-year plan designed by the superintendent, or a graduate school
may have to satisfy requirements of an accreditation association. Empowerment
evaluations, like all other evaluations, exist within a context. However, the
range of intermediate objectives linking what most people do in their daily
routine and macro goals is almost infinite. People often feel empowered and
self-determined when they can select meaningful intermediate objectives that
are linked to larger, global goals.
Despite its focus on self-determination and collaboration, empowerment evaluation
and traditional external evaluation are not mutually exclusive; to the contrary,
they enhance each other. In fact, the empowerment evaluation process produces
a rich data source that enables a more complete external examination. Greater
coordination between the needs of the internal and external forms of evaluation
can provide a reality check concerning external needs and expectations for insiders,
and a rich data base for external evaluators.
Finally, it is hoped that empowerment evaluation will benefit from the artful
shaping of our combined contributions rather than follow any single approach
or strategy.
David Fetterman
Stanford University and the California Institute of Integral Studies
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