A transdisciplinary model of program outcomes for enhanced evaluation practice

Abstract

Evaluation is a transdiscipline with a focus upon asking and answering important questions about programs, policies, and interventions. A unified taxonomy of evaluation-specific program outcomes would be a helpful tool to evaluators, program designers, implementers, and policymakers, but one has not yet been proposed and validated in an evaluation context. This study builds from a grounded analysis of 125 programs and over 850 individual program outcomes, from which was developed a taxonomy of nine outcomes specific to evaluating programs and interventions: attitude, affect, behavior, cognition, status, relationship, biological, environmental, and economic. The article defines key terms and directionality and suggests specific fields that provide a helpful lens for understanding programs and improving evaluation practice.