What are evaluation techniques for evaluation objectives? Describe in detail.

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Evaluation techniques Different evaluation techniques have different purposes, work in different contexts, and give you different types of feedback. Some techniques will be more useful for particular questions than others.

Evaluation techniques are often divided into quantitative and qualitative. You are likely to use both when evaluating information projects. The differences between the two are quite complex, but broadly speaking, quantitative evaluation counts numbers and qualitative explores processes, views, and feelings.

However, this rule does not hold up for all types of evaluation. Because of this, we have decided not to use this distinction. Instead, we describe the different evaluation techniques that can be used, and indicate the purposes, strengths and weaknesses they each have.

Getting feedback from users and others
If you want to know what people thought of the information (Did they like it? Did they think it was easy-to-read?) or how they used it, you can ask them in a range of different ways:

• Self-completion questionnaires - by post or online (see 'Designing self-completion questionnaires'for guidance).
• Face-to-face or telephone interviews.
• Group discussions, including focus groups.
• Intermediary or user diaries of activities and impressions.

All of these techniques will benefit from input from evaluators.

Some of these techniques - those that involve face-to-face interaction with intermediaries or users - are best undertaken by independent evaluators. If interviews are carried out by the creators of the information, it risks biasing people's responses.

Less interactive techniques like self-completion questionnaires and diaries are less prone to these bias issues, and so can be done without external help. However, you may still need the input of an evaluator to get the most out of them.

There is free software available that you can use to create simple online surveys or questionnaires.
For more complex surveys you will usually have to pay. www.surveymonkey.comLink opens in a new window www.questionpro.com/free-survey-software.htmlLink opens in a new window www.esurveyspro.comLink opens in a new window Understand how things work in practice.

If you want to know how things worked in practice (how it was really used, if users really understood it, etc), or to relate processes to the effectiveness of the information, you can find out by:

• informal observation - being around and watching what goes on;
• actively observing people doing things - intermediaries and users, users using the information;
• going through the information with them and asking them to explain it.

These techniques are extremely valuable because they show how things work in the real world. Good observation is very difficult to do well (probably impossible if you have been involved with the project and therefore have particular expectations), and does need to be carried out by an independent evaluator in order to get the most from it.

A word on outcomes and impact
'Outcomes' or 'impact' are ways of describing the effect the project had. A lot of emphasis is currently put on outcomes, and it is common for people to regard outcomes as the central aim of project evaluation. And not without reason, it is clearly hugely valuable to examine the influence of a project.

There are however two downsides to this current popularity that you should be aware of. The first is that social changes are very hard and usually very costly to measure with any confidence. It might be possible to identify a 'reliable' outcome with a project that has many thousands of users, with control groups who do not get the service, operating over a five-year period, and controlling for other social changes. But this might well cost several million pounds. The second is that other useful evaluation techniques are often dismissed because they do not obviously measure outcomes. This is a mistake.

Outcomes or aims are decided when the project is designed. Your evaluation should focus on these, and try to get as close as you can to assessing how far they were achieved, within the limited budget and time frame you have.