“Appreciative Inquiry starts with the premise that something works, even if it’s the exception.”
The appreciative approach is central to much of our evaluation work here at EnCompass, and it was one of the themes upon which our President, Tessie Catsambas, presented at an evaluation workshop convened by the Institute of Medicine in January of this year.
The workshop focused on best practices in evaluating complex global initiatives, and brought together evaluators, researchers in the field of evaluation science, implementers of large-scale health programs, local stakeholders, policy makers, donor representatives, and others to derive lessons learned from past large-scale evaluations and to discuss how to apply these lessons to future evaluations.
Evaluation Design for Complex Global Initiatives is the summary of the workshop that discusses transferable insights gained across the spectrum of choosing the evaluator, framing the evaluation, designing the evaluation, gathering and analyzing data, synthesizing findings and recommendations, and communicating key messages. The report also explores the relative benefits and limitations of different quantitative and qualitative approaches within the mixed methods designs used for these complex and costly evaluations.
A summary of Tessie’s presentation, which explored the value of qualitative methods, is available to read here.