What do service users think of evaluation? Evidence from family support

Abstract

Program evaluators increasingly strive to capture how service users experience child and family services. Yet user involvement is rare in a more routine form of evaluation: performance measurement. This article considers how service users’ perspectives can help improve the quality of performance indicators in child and family services. Qualitative research, conducted in family support contexts in New South Wales, Australia, identifies five user-defined domains upon which indicators can be based. As well as showing how parents judge service quality and outcomes, the findings also show how they experience data collection, and how they prefer to participate in the routine performance measurement and monitoring that informs child and family welfare provision.