Adapting Research and Evaluation to Meet Current Needs To meet the need for better research and evaluation, researchers and evaluators must analyze and assess their experiences with various approaches so they can learn from experience, adapt their methods to better fit the changing nature of programs, and share their progress with others. We're going to have failures. But if we don't take the risks we're not going to get where we want to be collectively. Innovative research and evaluation include new roles for evaluators and researchers as well as experimentation with new techniques and approaches. A more exact definition of outcomes would help researchers and evaluators identify program effects.
Current interventions are multi-dimensional and vary by community.
But when evaluators must assess programs that combine many different types of treatments into a complex intervention, the link between specific treatments and outcomes becomes hazy. Kagan advocated using four broad categories of outcomes. The first assesses the direct impact of the program on children and families and contains information on what children and families know and can do. The third category characterizes the services to which children and families have access. The fourth category examines service systems to assess their capacity, infrastructure, and accountability.