Doing effective evaluations: A case study of family empowerment due to welfare reform

Effective evaluation of human service programs is rapidly becoming more critical as more and more stakeholders demand dependable documentation of a program's impact. Comprehensive evaluation, done purposefully, improves services to our clientele and, ultimately, increases the chances a program will be sustained long-term. To meet this requirement for more rigorous program assessment, program planners and evaluators can benefit from theoretically sound tools that help them evaluate the impact of social service programming has for clients, organizations, states, and federally based programs. This manuscript presents an evaluation framework and applies it to a family empowerment program in Montana called Educating Families to Achieve Independence in Montana (EDUFAIM), developed in response to welfare reform. The framework is sufficiently broad in that it has applications within a variety of activities and settings.