Jane Davidson is former Associate Director of The Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University, where she launched and directed the world’s first fully interdisciplinary Ph.D. in evaluation. She is currently Director of Davidson Consulting Limited (New Zealand). Dr. Davidson received her Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University in organizational behavior, with substantial emphasis on evaluation. She has worked in various evaluation, consulting, and quality assurance-related roles in government, business, and education, and she has conducted trainings on coaching skills for managers and supervisors, training needs analysis, and customer service skills. Davidson has published in, or had work accepted for, the Encyclopedia of Evaluation (Sage), the Human Resources Program Evaluation Handbook (Sage), the International Handbook of Educational Evaluation (Kluwer), the Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate (Sage), the Handbook of Organizational Consulting Psychology (Sage), and Foundations and Evaluation: Contexts and Practices for Effective Philanthropy (Jossey–Bass). She has also published in the journals New Directions for Evaluation and The Psychologist-Manager Journal.
This book introduces evaluation by focusing on the main kinds of big picture' questions that evaluations usually need to answer, and how the nature of such questions are linked to evaluation methodology choices. The author: shows how to identify the right criteria for your evaluation; discusses how to objectively figure out which criteria are more important than the others; and, delves into how to combine a mix of qualitative and quantitative data with relevant values' (such as needs) to draw explicitly evaluative conclusions.
