A Study about Monitoring and Evaluation:Technical Notes
Process evaluations assess how effectively a public action is being implemented; they focus on aspects such as who is participating, what activities are being offered, what actions have been taken, and what staff practices and client responses are. A process evaluation may be conducted when problems such as delays, cost overruns, or beneficiary dissatisfaction have been detected by the monitoring system, or may be carried out regularly as an early-warning system. Process evaluations tend to rely on less formal evaluation designs and modes of inquiry such as self-evaluation and expert judgment.
Outcome evaluations assess what happened to individuals (or other units of analysis) after policy or program implementation; they focus on intervention outcomes such as whether people are healthier, better educated, or less vulnerable to adverse shocks. Evaluation designs for outcome evaluations vary along a continuum of levels of complexity. At one end of the spectrum are outcome evaluations that simply assess whether program participants experienced any changes in key welfare indicators—these are basically monitoring exercises. Evaluation designs and data collection and analysis methods at this end of the spectrum tend to be relatively simple and quick to yield results, but they leave room for differing interpretations of how much of a change can be attributed to a particular intervention. Keep reading…
