Evaluation ─ A Cultural Systems Approach

In an era of budgetary belt-tightening, policymakers must prove that their programs work or face drastic cuts in spending. This book, informed by the author's many years of practice in program evaluation and expertise as an anthropologist, discusses in plain prose the theory and methods of culturally-competent evaluation across a number of disciplines, such as health and education, for graduate and advanced undergraduate students and professionals. The book
-guides readers through the process of evaluation in complex contexts created by cultural change, the movement of populations, economic forces and constantly emerging crises;
-introduces rich ethnographic theory and methods developed by anthropologists to evaluators in other fields;
-teaches anthropologists and other social scientists research techniques developed in such fields as business or public-policy evaluation;
-provides a strategy for building evidence from both qualitative and quantitative sources to form conclusions that have scientific credibility.

Mary Odell Butler is an anthropologist-evaluator with 35 years of experience in research design, management, and evaluation, along with 12 years of university teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels. She has special expertise in program evaluation, evaluation research, and case-study methods and has conducted numerous projects for Center for Disease Control, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health, and private foundations. She has been chair of the Committee for Practicing, Applied and Public Interest Anthropology, a standing committee of the American Anthropological Association, and a Past President of the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology. In addition to her academic responsibilities, she is employed by Westat, a consulting firm in Rockville, Maryland, as a Senior Analyst supporting work in evaluation of public health programs. Butler is co-editor of Applying Anthropology in the Global Village (Left Coast, 2011) and Creating Evaluation Anthropology: Introducing an Emerging Subfield (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005).