Abstract
In 2012, the American Evaluation Association (AEA) added community psychology (CP) to its roster of topical interests groups (TIG). One of the highlights of the CP TIG program at the 2012 AEA Conference and the genesis of this American Journal of Evaluation Forum was a panel of accomplished community psychologists and evaluation practitioners that included James Cook, Rebecca Campbell, Robin Lin Miller, and Michael Morris with David Fetterman as discussant. This forum brings together three of these panelists: James Cook, Robin Lin Miller, and Michael Morris who have each offered to the evaluation community an essay on the community psychology—evaluation nexus. In this introduction, we offer our highlights and takeaways from these three essays, which provide their unique perspectives on evaluation through the lens of CP and from their practical experiences.
Keywords
Introduction
In 2012, the American Evaluation Association (AEA) added community psychology (CP) to its roster of topical interest groups (TIG). There were four reasons for starting this TIG. First was the articulation and introduction of CP to an audience known more for its methodological than values focus. Second, there are many evaluation practitioners who incorporate CP values into their work yet are unaware of the inherent connection with CP. Third, because many evaluation practitioners do not incorporate CP values into their work, and their evaluations and the people either with whom or for whom they work would greatly benefit from a CP perspective. Fourth, because many CP practitioners are AEA members and this TIG creates a home for them within the association. The TIG leaders wanted to make sure that there was a forum within AEA where the CP’s influence on and role in evaluation could be discussed, debated, and elevated to higher visibility.
Over the past 3 years, the CP TIG has grown from a small nucleus of like-minded evaluators and community psychologists to a membership of 153 drawn by our core mission and values. Among others, the membership includes practitioners, academics, applied researchers, social scientists, community and political activists, agents of social change, and participant conceptualizers. The overarching mission of the CP TIG is to promote the values of CP, as they relate to the field of evaluation and to use the methods, practice, theory, and research on evaluation to enhance the field of CP. In addition, we promote the following perspectives in the TIG: ecological (i.e., settings and individuals are interrelated), person–environment fit, attention to issues of diversity and context, social justice, grounded in empiricism, and methodology acknowledges value-driven research that includes community members as active participants; quantitative, qualitative, and other innovative methods are embraced.
One of our notable achievements in 2012—our first year of programming—was our strong presence at the AEA annual conference in Minneapolis. The theme of the conference, “Evaluation in Complex Ecologies Relationships, Responsibilities, and Relevance,” could not have pleased us more because our sessions were well populated. The attendees included community psychologists who practice evaluation and evaluators who are engaged in community work, and they were quite enthusiastic. The penultimate moment of our conference program and the genesis of this American Journal of Evaluation Forum was a panel of accomplished community psychologists and evaluation practitioners that included James Cook, Rebecca Campbell, Robin Lin Miller, and Michael Morris with David Fetterman as discussant. This forum brings together three of these panelists: James Cook, Robin Lin Miller, and Michael Morris who have each offered to the evaluation community an essay on the CP—evaluation nexus. By way of introduction, we offer our highlights from these three essays and hope you will be as enlightened as we were by their unique perspectives on evaluation through the lens of CP and from their practical experiences.
The Authors, the Essays, and Lessons Learned
The first essay is by James R. Cook, PhD, who is a professor of psychology and coordinator of the Community Psychology Training Program, University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is past president and fellow of the Society for Community Research and Action (n.d; Division 27, Community Psychology, the American Psychological Association). There were two primary takeaways from Cook’s essay.
First, community psychologists view evaluation as a change strategy in that the methods and strategies for learning and understanding inherent in program evaluation should be combined with explicit, deliberate strategies for effecting change. Merely providing information is not sufficient, given that information alone rarely results in behavior change and factors that facilitate or impede change need to be assessed as part of a broader evaluability assessment.
Second, Cook explains the CP—evaluation nexus resides in the values of the former and the Guiding Principles of the latter. The core values held by community psychologists that influence their evaluation practice are similar to AEA’s guiding principles for evaluation (AEA, 2004) in that they place emphasis on competent, honest enquiry that respects the security, dignity, and self-worth of respondents, program participants, clients, and other evaluation stakeholders as our guiding principles call for us to “articulate and take into account the diversity of general and public interests and values that may be related to the evaluation,” and “to go beyond analysis of particular stakeholder interests and consider the welfare of society as a whole.” However, in a departure from many types of evaluation we are familiar with, evaluation as practiced by community psychologists emphasizes the contextual factors influencing the operation of the program being evaluated which ultimately impacts the behaviors of program participants. Additionally, a strong value is placed on collaboration and partnership among researchers and community members or groups to address community needs and effect change at different levels, from the individual through the societal.
The second essay is by Robin Lin Miller, PhD, who is a professor of ecological—CP at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on effective HIV/AIDS prevention and care for young Black gay and bisexual men and on evaluation theory and practice.
The importance of Miller’s essay was learning that as a field of practice, CP blends evaluation and social criticism in the pursuit of social justice. The role of the community psychologist is to blend systematically gathered evidence through evaluation with critique to achieve a better world, although very little has been written on how training in CP informs the way a community psychologist practices evaluation. In some respects, CP’s theory and practice literature has overlapping interests with evaluation in promoting social change, appreciating diversity in perspective and values, engaging in collaborative practice, and ensuring the relevance and utility of gathered evidence.
Yet, as Miller points out, there is a difference between theories of evaluation and theories of CP. This difference is about how evaluators and evaluations influence social justice, given assumptions about how one influences social change through the production and use of evidence and how to enact one’s moral professional responsibilities. Hence, there is a tension between acting credibly as a community psychologist and as an evaluator as prescribed in many theories of evaluation practice. That said, community psychologists as evaluators are prescriptive in their valuing and openly advocate their value positions and have evolved unique perspectives on and approaches to evaluation that places evaluative activity at the core of their practice to identify optimal social ecologies and create social change that promotes community well-being.
The final essay is by Michael Morris, PhD, who is a professor of psychology at the University of New Haven, where he directs the master’s program in CP. His research focuses on the ethical challenges encountered by program evaluators in their work, and he provides training in evaluation ethics to evaluators throughout the United States and abroad. Morris’ essay offers three important observations about the field of evaluation that resonated with us.
First, after discussing how CP and evaluation both arose during the first years of the “Great Society,” Morris points out the irony that evaluation has never fully embraced. Evaluators are advocates, and evaluations are conducted for the sake of social justice. For example, the fifth Guiding Principle for Evaluators states that “evaluators have obligations that encompass the public interest and good.… threats to the public interest should never be ignored in any evaluation,” as our program evaluation standards claim that we should “commit to addressing issues of inequity and social justice in programs…consider the role of the evaluation in addressing unfairness in the program…[and] facilitate understanding of decision making and power structures within programs and contexts and their impact on stakeholders’ rights” (AEA, 2009, p. 122). Thus, we are more or should aspire to be more than technicians ensuring the methodological rigor of narrowly focused research on social programs because the Guiding Principles and program evaluation standards mandate otherwise.
Second, one aspect of evaluation that overlaps with CP is cultural competence, which, for us, represents our intellectual legacy of a social justice–oriented focus on disenfranchised groups. CP had already included cultural competence as one of its Guiding Concepts prior to the AEA’s ethics-laden Public Statement on Cultural Competence in Evaluation issued in 2011 because it was recognized by many that nondominant cultures which cannot defend themselves are more vulnerable and subject to abuse/neglect by powerful stakeholders. As Morris points out, both fields now have a commitment to collaborating with and empowering disenfranchised groups for the sake of meaningful evaluations, responsive interventions, and positive social change.
Third, Morris’ discussion on CP’s wellness as fairness framework calls our attention to four types of social justice that, if we attend to them can help us mitigate some of the ethical dilemmas we might face during an evaluation: (1) relational (i.e., involves individuals’ perceptions of fairness in the manner in which they are treated, especially in terms of being accorded dignity and respect), (2) informational (i.e., refers to perceptions of the fairness of the information used as the basis for making a decision), (3) procedural (i.e., focuses on how people view the fairness of the procedures used to determine the outcomes they receive), and (4) distributive (addresses individuals’ beliefs about the fairness of their work-related outcomes such as pay or recognition).
Common Themes
Overall, what we hope you will take away from these essays is (1) the similarities and differences between CP and evaluation and (2) how CP can inform evaluation practice. We think it is important to remember that CP and evaluation share similar roots with social justice a part of our respective ethos. To that end, each offers guidance for practice in the form of Guiding Concepts (CP) and Guiding Principle for Evaluators (evaluation) which are both clear in their mandates.
Another similarity is that of cultural competence as outlined in CP’s Guiding Concepts and evaluation’s Public Statement on Cultural Competence (AEA, 2011). Regarding the differences between CP and evaluation, it is interesting to note that evaluation is part of a community psychologist’s training and is a core competency, yet CP is not part of evaluation training or a core competency save for evaluators’ use of empowering evaluation approaches in practice (e.g., community psychology is foundational to empowerment evaluation). Likewise, when a community psychologist conducts an evaluation, they are not value neutral in that the evaluator actually advocates on behalf of program beneficiaries for the sake of social justice. By training or experience, we have come to understand our role as being value neutral lest our biases contaminate the research enterprise.