Evaluability assessment: an overview
by
Markus Themessl-Huber
mthemesslhuber@gmail.com
1
Introduction
Evaluations are potentially resource-intensive endeavours that have the power to
determine the fate of organisations, services and people. Yet, the nature of many health
promotion activities threaten the conduct of an appropriate evaluation. These challenges
include the intrinsically political nature of health promotion, ill-defined services, fuzzy
objectives, inaccessible or uncooperative staff and/or other stakeholders, and difficulties
in the implementation of evaluation outcomes [1]. One consequence of these issues, that
has been highlighted for decades, has been the lack of uptake and utilisation of evaluation
outcomes by policy makers and practitioners to develop organisations or services [2, 3].
As a result, various authors have called for a stage preceding the conduct of full-scale
evaluations, which should help develop health promotion activities from initial
‘rhetorical’ models to ‘evaluable’ ones (Rutman, 1977). This stage has been referred to as
pre-evaluation [3], developing a program model [2], and rapid feedback evaluation [4, 5],
or ex ante evaluation in more economically oriented approaches [6]. The most commonly
used term is evaluability assessment [7].
However, evaluability assessment (EA) is not simply the first stage of an evaluation. It
distinctively precedes the commissioning of an evaluation. EA is most benefitial if
conducted as a distinct activity independent of the actual evaluation. In the course of
conducting an EA all stakeholders including the evaluators will contribute to the
development of health promotion activities and the identification and clarification of
information required for an effective evaluation. Importantly, the EA processes and
outcomes will inform the stakeholders’ decision about whether or not an organisation,
service, or intervention can be meaningfully evaluated.
What is an evaluability assessment?
The overall purpose of a