Health Promotion Evaluation

The purpose of this article is to distinguish the various evaluation terms and methods into conceptual levels of evaluation terminology, being evaluation approaches, evaluation purposes, evaluation methods, and evaluation design. It also looks at health promotion evaluation in a New Zealand context.
This article resulted because New Zealand Health Promotion evaluation was at turning point as originally it started from government top-down processes, then to a bottom up approach utilising various methods involving stakeholders.
The main idea of this article was to distinguish the various evaluation terms and methods and to conceptualise these terms into four conceptual levels, being evaluation approaches e.g how the evaluation is orientated, evaluation purposes / types e.g which evaluation activity is going to be used such as impact/outcome evaluation, process evaluation, and formative/developmental evaluation. In addition, each of the evaluation types is interrelated where findings from the process evaluation can be used as input into formative evaluation if the activity / program is still operating and can be amended. Furthermore, evaluation methods which can be used for various types of evaluation within different evaluation approaches. Finally, Evaluation design which puts together all the evaluation approaches in order to answer evaluation questions.

The major issue in this article is there has been a great deal of confusion with evaluation approaches over the years which led to disagreements. The main disagreements were caused by people mixing up the terms which were dealing with various aspects of evaluation. For example, one person may be talking about a Stakeholder Evaluation approach and another person may be talking about a purpose e.g Process evaluation. They are all part of the evaluation, but there was a need to distinguish each evaluation approach to provide more clarity for evaluators and stakeholders.

One of the key strengths in this