Empowerment Evaluation: Collaboration, Action Research, and a Case Example

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. A wide range of program and policy sectors use empowerment evaluation, including substance abuse prevention, HIV prevention, crime prevention, welfare reform, battered women's shelters, agriculture and rural development, adult probation, adolescent pregnancy prevention, tribal partnership for substance abuse, selfdetermination and individuals with disabilities, doctoral programs, and accelerated schools. Descriptions of programs that use empowerment evaluation appear in Empowerment Evaluation: Knowledge and Tools for Self-assessment and Accountability(Fetterman, Kaftarian, and Wandersman 1996). Empowerment Evaluation(Fetterman, in press) provides additional insight into this new evaluation approach, including information about how to conduct workshops to train program staff members and participants to evaluate and improve program practice (see also Fetterman 1994a, and 1994b.) In addition, this approach has been institutionalized within the American Evaluation Association and is consistent with the spirit of the standards developed by the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation (Fetterman 1995b; Joint Committee, 1994).