An Odd Couple with Promise: Researchers and Practitioners in Evaluation Settings*

An Odd Couple with Promise: Researchers and Practitioners in Evaluation Settings* Evaluation of programs for families continues to grow in importance. The best evaluation studies involve collaborations between evaluation researchers and practitioners, but the two groups represent different cultures. Cultural differences are seen in temporal orientation, cognitive resources, values and definitions of excellence, patterns of communication, daily life styles, and use of tools. The author provides eight suggested steps to improve collaboration through the determination of shared goals, clarification of boundaries, and improved communication. Key Words: evaluation, researchers, practitioners. Researchers and practitioners make an odd couple. As a professional whose job it is to communicate researchbased information about children and families to the public and to community professionals, I have heard complaints from both members of this couple. It seems to be a never-ending cycle. Practitioners create programs. Researchers ask practitioners to identify the empirical base to support the program's design. Practitioners complain that the relevant research is not available. Researchers reply that the research is being conducted, but it is too soon to provide answers. Practitioners remind researchers that they are working with families now and need answers immediately. Researchers add that they do not understand enough about practice to be able to identify program implications of their findings. Practitioners go away complaining that researchers do not care about what is ultimately most important: the well-being of real families in need. Researchers go away complaining that practitioners do not care about what is ultimately most important: seeking truth about families, children, and their interactions. In many situations this couple's differences may remain unresolved, and the result is not necessarily seriously detrimental to either one. However, these stresses and conflicts seem to reach a crisis level when the two attempt to collaborate. That collaboration may be most intense when they work together to evaluate a program. As a professional who has experience with both research and practice, I was asked to evaluate a statewide early-- intervention home-visiting program. In that role, I have experienced many of those crises. Researchers and practitioners live in different worlds with different traditions, rules, and expectations-different cultures. The goal of this paper is to help all family specialists to lower the frequency and intensity of conflicts that arise from the cultural differences between those who take a research/data-based approach to understanding families and those who take a clientcentered, hands-on approach aimed at changing outcomes for individual families. I hope that researchers will begin to understand the perspective of the practitioners and anticipate misunderstandings and concerns. I hope that practitioners will begin to understand the needs and perspective of the researchers and learn ways to negotiate evaluation strategies that benefit both the clientele and the knowledge base. The issues and examples may not be new for many readers-in fact, I expect that readers will often nod in recognition. Hopefully, what is new is the larger picture that makes the issues and examples understandable and manageable in new ways. Although technically researchers and evaluators are engaged in different pursuits that involve different motivations and goals, this paper focuses instead on the differences between two groups: those who are primarily concerned with knowledge generation and data manipulation, which includes both researchers and evaluators, compared to those who are concerned with helping and making a change in individuals and families. Although researchers and evaluators are not identical, both groups tend to think in very similar ways and use very similar tools. …