Conference presentation
Resilience, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means: Defining Complex Concepts in Program Evaluation
American Evaluation Association (Virtual, 11/08/2021–11/12/2021)
11/11/2021
Abstract
As part of a five-year evaluation of the Iowa Watershed Approach, a complex, multi-component, and multi-stakeholder flood management program, our team was tasked with describing the program’s contributions to “increasing flood resilience.” Program stakeholders lacked a shared operationalization of flood resilience, and little published work established clear definitions. Given the complexity of defining flood resilience for a project at this scale, and given the program’s developmental nature, our team built a working definition through observations of program activities as part of our ongoing formative evaluation. This presentation details the processes used by our evaluation team to define the concept of flood resilience, compares our definition to another in the literature, and describes lessons learned through these processes. We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of defining central program constructs through program observation and data collection and provides insights for evaluators working with flood resilience and other complex concepts.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Resilience, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means: Defining Complex Concepts in Program Evaluation
- Creators
- Logan Drake (Author) - University of Iowa, Center for Evaluation and AssessmentValerie Decker (Author) - University of IowaAsih Asikin-Garmager (Author) - University of Iowa, Center for Evaluation and AssessmentHacer Karamese
- Resource Type
- Conference presentation
- Conference
- American Evaluation Association (Virtual, 11/08/2021–11/12/2021)
- Number of pages
- 31 slides
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2021 the presenters
- Language
- English
- Date presented
- 11/11/2021
- Academic Unit
- Center for Evaluation and Assessment
- Record Identifier
- 9984770084302771
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