A number of key issues frequently emerge in the practice of evaluation. One needs to be familiar with these issues to most effectively engage evaluation professionals in one’s program and to make appropriate inferences or interpretations from evaluation data. In this article, three of those background issues are discussed: qualitative research, quantitative research, and experimental design. Although not intended to be a comprehensive treatise on the subject, this article will cover the strengths and limitations of methodologies, what questions are possible to answer within these methodologies, and the influence of research designs on the inferences that can be drawn from data.
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