Empowerment Evaluation: Knowledge and Tools for Self-Assessment, Evaluation Capacity Building, and Accountability

This Second Edition celebrates 21 years of the practice of empowerment evaluation, a term first coined by David Fetterman during his presidential address for the American Evaluation Association. Since that time, this approach has altered the landscape of evaluation and has spread to a wide range of settings in more than 16 countries. In this new book, an outstanding group of evaluators from academia, government, nonprofits, and foundations assess how empowerment evaluation has been used in practice since the publication of the landmark 1996 edition. The book includes 10 empowerment evaluation principles, a number of models and tools to help put empowerment evaluation into practice, reflections on the history and future of the approach, and illustrative case studies from a number of different projects in a variety of diverse settings. The Second Edition offers readers the most current insights into the practice of this stakeholder-involvement approach to evaluation.

Shakeh Kaftarian is President and CEO of Kaftarian & Associates, a consulting firm offering empowerment evaluation services to national and international organizations.  Her interests include community coalition building, substance abuse prevention programming, and women’s health research.  She has held positions as a research and evaluation scientist at the National Institutes of Health; Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration; and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.   She has served as Senior Advisor at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, and Adjunct Research Professor at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.  She is the co-editor of the first edition of Empowerment Evaluation: Knowledge and Tools for Self-Assessment and Accountability (SAGE, 1996), and has authored a number of peer-reviewed articles and Federal evaluation research reports.  She has also served as guest editor for the Journal of Primary Prevention; Prevention Science; Evaluation and Program Planning; and Journal of Community Psychology. 

Abraham Wandersman is a Professor of Psychology at the University of South Carolina-Columbia.  Dr. Wandersman performs research and program evaluation on citizen participation in community organizations and coalitions and on interagency collaboration.  He is a co-editor of three books on empowerment evaluation, and a co-author of several Getting To Outcomes accountability books (how-to manuals for planning, implementation, and evaluation to achieve results). Abraham collaborated with CDC to develop the Interactive Systems Framework for Dissemination and Implementation―the subject of two special issues of a peer-reviewed journal (2008, 2012).  In 1998, he received the Myrdal Award for Evaluation Practice from the American Evaluation Association. In 2000, he was elected President of the Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA).   In 2005, he was awarded the Distinguished Theory and Research Contributions Award by SCRA.  In 2008, Getting To Outcomes won the American Evaluation Association’s Outstanding Publication Award.  In 2013, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Injury Prevention of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.