Beginning an Evaluation with RUFDATA: Theorizing a Practical Approach to Evaluation Planning

Abstract

This article draws on research into evaluation and on the tacit practices used in an evaluation agency to develop an approach to initiating new evaluators into evaluation planning processes. Using these two sources as a base, this article suggests that it is possible to conceptualize evaluation as a series of knowledge-based practices. These knowledge-based practices form the resources of ‘communities of practice’, i.e. a group of practising evaluators. In that this conceptualization refers to any job, work or occupation, beginning to be an evaluator, just like beginning any job or work, requires the ‘novice’ to be inducted or socialized into the ‘community of practice’. Understanding evaluation activity in this way should provide the basis for some enabling ‘tools’ for thinking about an evaluation design. The learning as an outcome of ‘process use’ is, in fact, the way we might prompt access to a reservoir of experiential and other knowledge in order for evaluations to be carried out by new evaluators, within the normative frame of a group of evaluators. In essence, it involves a process of reflexive questioning during which key procedural dimensions of an evaluation are addressed, leading to an accelerated induction into key aspects of evaluation design. It enables initial planning to occur and an evaluation to ‘get off the ground’. RUFDATA is the acronym given to questions which consolidate this reflexive process. To that extent, the approach is a ‘meta-evaluative’ tool. It outlines RUFDATA as an example of such an approach and demonstrates its use by a ‘mini case study’.