Building evaluation capacity: definitional and practical implications from an Australian case study

Internationally, evaluation capacity-building activities have mushroomed as demands have increased for government-funded programs to demonstrate that they are effective and efficient. Despite this, there is a lack of clarity in the way in which evaluation capacity-building is defined and conceptualized. The current paper presents a case study of a national evaluation capacity building exercise that we are in the midst of conducting in Australia, and discusses the findings in relation to definitional, conceptual and practical issues. Specifically, we describe an evaluation capacity building exercise involving over 100 mental health projects, detailing the methods that we employ, some of the challenges that we have faced, and the benefits we feel we are achieving. Our key message is that definitions of evaluation capacity-building should not only make reference to equipping organizations to routinely conduct evaluations, but should also stress the varied uses to which evaluation findings can be put. In addition, such definitions should acknowledge some of the valuable by-products of evaluation capacity building activities, such as the development of shared understandings of the program or project being evaluated.     

Dialogues with entrepreneurs in China: How start-up companies cultivate relationships with strategic publics

This qualitative study examined relationship cultivation and public relations practices in start-up companies in Mainland China. Findings from 28 in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs in China¹ suggest that employees and customers are the most important strategic publics for start-ups, followed by investors, the media, and the government. Symmetrical relationship cultivation strategies suggested in previous literature apply to the start-up context in China with specific variations. New strategies such as vision and value communication, empowerment, authentic communication, and proactive reporting were identified for start-ups to build quality relationships with various strategic publics. Compared with large established corporations, start-ups have unique public relations purposes, needs, and scope of practice. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

"Nothing about me without me": leading the way to collaborative relationships with families

This article discusses the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse's CASA Safe Haven, an evidence-based, community-driven intervention program for children and families in child welfare whose lives have been adversely affected by substance abuse, and for staff in the agencies that work with them. CASA Safe Haven builds collaborative relationships that feature a blend of multidisciplinary teams that share responsibility for helping families; family group conferencing, in which families are equal and welcome participants in designing and driving a service plan; and the influence of family court to hold families and service providers accountable for progress. CASA Safe Haven is a framework for collaboration.     

Public support for social security

This article reports the results of a nationally representative survey of 1,209 Americans that examines their support for Social Security and six other major social welfare programs. It probes the extent to which members of the public are willing to demonstrate their support, the differences in support among population subgroups, and the extent to which perceptions of Social Security and Social Security recipients predict overall support for Social Security. The authors find high levels of support among members of the public, including a willingness both to write letters to congress members and to pay higher taxes. Some groups of citizens—especially blacks and those who classify themselves as liberals—are more supportive than others, but the differences are not great and contribute little toward explaining the variance in support. The perceptions that the program makes a worthwhile contribution to society and that recipients have no alternative sources of income other than Social Security contribute the most toward predicting overall support for Social Security.     

An Introduction to Practical Sequential Inferences via Single-Arm Binary Response Studies Using the binseqtest R Package

We review sequential designs, including group sequential and two-stage designs, for testing or estimating a single binary parameter. We use this simple case to introduce ideas common to many sequential designs, which in this case can be explained without explicitly using stochastic processes. We focus on methods provided by our newly developed R package, binseqtest, which exactly bound the Type I error rate of tests and exactly maintain proper coverage of confidence intervals. Within this framework, we review some allowable practical adaptations of the sequential design. We explore issues such as the following: How should the design be modified if no assessment was made at one of the planned sequential stopping times? How should the parameter be estimated if the study needs to be stopped early? What reasons for stopping early are allowed? How should inferences be made when the study is stopped for crossing the boundary, but later information is collected about responses of subjects that had enrolled before the decision to stop but had not responded by that time? Answers to these questions are demonstrated using basic methods that are available in our binseqtest R package. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.