Formative for Program Evaluation

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact time at which a new field of study emerges as a distinctenterprise—that point where otherwise disparate conceptual threads, biographies, and orga-nizational agendas have knit together around a common theme sufficiently to produce a shared sense of identity. For program evaluation, this happened sometime in the 1970s on the coattails of the Lyndon Johnson era of Great Society programs and the War on Poverty. The term “eval-uation ” began to come into common usage to describe applied research on social programs, “social relevance ” was a hot topic in the social sciences, and the demand for evaluation by gov-ernmental agencies at all levels was on the upswing. During that decade, the first professional organizations identified with program evaluation were formed, the first journals with evalua-tion in the title were launched, and graduate-level courses on the topic began to appear. Perhaps the signal event that most clearly demarcated the point when evaluation became an acknowl-edged field of study was the publication of the first textbook aimed at defining the scope of the enterprise and introducing novices to its perspective. Two of the earliest candidates for tha