Stakeholding in Evaluation

Abstract

The nature of stakeholder involvement is an issue for all program evaluations. In an evaluation that adopts a ’stakeholder as informant’ position, decisions need to be taken about which individual(s) or group(s) will be approached and how their responses will be captured as part of the data collection. An approach which adopts a ‘stakeholder as participant’ perspective will, on the other hand, involve additional considerations as to how relevant individuals or groups may become active participants with opportunities to make distinctive contributions to the evaluation flow (see section 12.3), as opposed to being only on the receiving end of a questionnaire, a one-to-one interview, a classroom observation or the administration of a test.

We are indebted to the work and ideas of Dermot Murphy in this chapter.