A Look at Process: The Often Ignored Component of Program Evaluation

AbstractDue to past inadequacies in determining outcome of community-based studies, considerable emphasis is now being placed upon program directors to adopt more elaborate and sophisticated techniques for measuring change. As a result of stress given to collecting adequate outcome data, many people may be so involved in studying the results of primary project goals that they tend to ignore other data which may appear trivial. One type of data which may seem relatively unimportant is what I term process data, information in diary form telling what happened at all stages of the project. This paper discusses how gathering such data can be valuable in learning what actually occurred and why it happened as it did.