ABSTRACT
Although Crobach and colleagues touted the rather prophetic contention over thirty years ago that “evaluation has become the liveliest frontier of American social science” (Cronbach et al., 1980, pp. 12–13), many of us working in this field never really thought it was so. Today however, from a perusal of the social science and applied professional literature, they were “spot on.” A recent content analysis of three core North American empirical social work journals reveled that approximately 25 percent of the published articles across a three year span were about program or practice evaluation (Holosko, 2010a). Indeed, in the past 35 or so years in North America, the ubiquitous trends of increased demands for social and health care services coupled with scarcer resources, have resulted in a burgeoning of program and practice evaluation activities. Generally, these often serve as the validation or legitimacy for many health and social service programs, and well-conceived programs, be they federal, state, or local, now routinely incorporate evaluation requirements and funding formulae for their disbursement of services.
