Evaluation Workshops for Capacity Building in Welfare Work : Some Swedish Examples

• Ever increasing demands are being made on welfare organizations to display efficiency. Evaluation workshops constitute a form of learning for the purposes of building up competence to conduct evaluations within welfare organizations, with the support of research and development units. In workshops of this kind, welfare work professionals meet in order to conduct evaluations together with researchers/professional evaluators.This article presents experiences from 10 such evaluation workshops conducted in western Sweden.The workshops were perceived very positively by the participants. While the evaluations are being conducted, the participants also develop a more general competence in this field.The evaluations conducted at the workshops are primarily internal, but with external support, with all the limitations this involves in relation to the possibilities for critical scrutiny. Evaluation workshops have a beneficial effect on the learning of evaluation methods by directly combining learning and conducting evaluation. The workshops may also serve to build capacity in the organizations for evaluative work.

Nyckelord

evaluation

capacity building

internal evaluation

learning

welfare work

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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