ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that, despite the very practical intent of evaluation efforts in social marketing, the evaluations designed and conducted are often not useful. Reasonable behavior change expectations for which communications can be held accountable and evaluated to some extent include the usual hierarchy of effects: awareness, knowledge, attitudes, intentions, reported behavior, and behavior. Evaluation studies of communications in social marketing may not be directed at a realistic, agreed on communication objective—the action marketers want the target audience to take as a result of the communication. Common obstacles to doing practical evaluation include failure to agree on realistic, communication objectives, some irrelevant questions, failure to design action-oriented research, and a misguided reliance on an experimental paradigm. The gold standard evaluation method of the logical positivist or hard science paradigm is the clinical trial, which is essentially a large, randomized controlled experiment.
