Most Americans consume diets at odds with nutrition recommendations, contributing to our ongoing epidemics of noncommunicable diseases. One strategy for accelerating progress toward healthier diets involves formal agreements between companies and nongovernmental organizations to develop new products, reformulate existing products, and implement…

Over the last few decades, there has been an increase in the number of large federally funded transdisciplinary programs and initiatives. Scholars have identified a need to develop frameworks, methodologies, and tools to evaluate the effectiveness of these large collaborative initiatives, providing precise ways to understand and assess the…

The flexibility federal block grants provide recipients poses challenges for evaluation. These challenges include aggregating data on wide-ranging activities grant recipients implement and the outcomes they achieve. In 2014, we began designing an evaluation to address the challenges of assessing outcomes and to improve outcome accountability for…

Sustainable community health improvement often requires the implementation of complex interventions in complex systems. Drawing from the "Four Keys to Success" frame (theory, implementation, support, and evaluation), this article describes how we used a formative evaluation approach to foster a learning system capable of monitoring and…

Collective impact (CI) initiatives provide a promising collaborative community-based approach for addressing health disparities, but they are challenging to evaluate. This paper provides a detailed strategy for addressing these challenges through a case study, with the goal of not only of evaluating the CI, but also putting organizations in a…

Although research on evaluation instruction has increased in the past decade, little is known about evaluation education in Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH)-accredited schools of public health and master of public health (MPH) programs. In this study, instruction of competencies for program evaluators as enumerated by Stevahn, King,…

This article examines the theoretical basis of the community as it is evoked in health evaluation. In particular, we examine how hospitals carrying out Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNAs) define communities as well as the implications for these definitions for how to study and engage community problems. We present qualitative findings from…

Chronic diseases with behavioral risk factors are now the leading causes of death in the United States. A national Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) monitors those risk factors; however, there is a need for national and state evaluations of chronic disease surveillance systems. The Department of Health and Human Services/Centers…

Researcher--community partnerships are a necessary but not sufficient facet of effective research and evaluation with community-based projects and in clinical settings. This article describes two approaches that we have integrated into a multiyear, multiphase research and evaluation initiative supporting the health and well-being of vulnerable…

Interest from Congress, executive branch leadership, and various other stakeholders for greater accountability in government continues to gain momentum today with government-wide efforts. However, measuring the impact of research programs has proven particularly difficult. Cause and effect linkages between research findings and changes to…

Despite advances in the sexual violence (SV) prevention field, practitioners still face challenges with identifying indicators to measure the impact of their prevention strategies. Public data, such as existing administrative and surveillance system data, may be a good option for organizations to examine trends in indicators for the purpose of…

The evaluation community has demonstrated an increased emphasis and interest in evaluation capacity building in recent years. A need currently exists to better understand how to measure evaluation capacity and its potential outcomes. In this study, we distributed an online questionnaire to managers and evaluation points of contact working in…

Evaluating initiatives implemented across multiple settings can elucidate how various contextual factors may influence both implementation and outcomes. Understanding context is especially critical when the same program has varying levels of success across settings. We present a framework for evaluating contextual factors affecting an initiative…

This article provides an introduction to geographic information systems (GIS) and how the technology can be used to enhance evaluation practice. As a tool, GIS enables evaluators to incorporate contextual features (such as accessibility of program sites or community health needs) into evaluation designs and highlights the interactions between…

The importance of evaluation use has led to a large amount of theoretical and empirical study. Evaluation use, however, is still not well understood. There is a need to capture the complexity of this phenomenon across a diverse range of contexts. In response to such complexities, the notion of "evaluation influence" emerged. This article presents…