Ep 4: Dr. Ryan Watkins - Assessing Needs and Big Data

Dr. Tamara Hamai, Ph.D., is the President of Hamai Consulting which empowers nonprofits to make extraordinary improvements in the well-being of children. She has been working in evaluation and research since 2001. Dr. Hamai recieved her M.A. and Ph.D. in Applied Developmental Psychology from Claremont Graduate University. She has dedicated her career as a researcher, consultant, and teacher to improving human services for children and families.   In this episode, we talk with Dr. Tamara Hamai about her 10 years experience as an independent consultant in evaluation. This is a must listen for any evaluation consultant. She discusses strategies to build client partnerships, helpful resources, and what she believes are the ways consultants distract themselves when opening shop.

Stanley Capela has been involved in program evaluation activities for 40 years and has done near everything. He has led over a hundred workshops and site visits internationally. His accomplishments and titles are more than can be fit in this description box. A powerhouse in the evaluation community, we talk with Stanley about what it takes to be successful as an internal evaluator, why language matters, and ensuring no one slips through the cracks in evaluations.

Ryan Watkins, Ph.D. is a Professor at the George Washington University in Washington DC, where he teaches and does research on needs assessments, instructional design, and human-technology collaborations. He is co-host of the podcast Parsing Science, developer of the We Share Science (www.wesharescience.org) platform for sharing video abstracts of scientific research; and maintains the website www.needsassessment.org as a resource site for those conducting needs assessments. In this episode, we discuss what separates a need vs. a want, how technology may be changing this, and how evaluators can take advantage of technological trends in their work.

In today's episode we speak with two professional evaluators about listening to context. Ciara C Knight has over 10 years of professional experience in program evaluation and applied research stretching many different communities. Ciara Knight is a masters-trained professional in Industrial/Organizational Psychology and is currently pursuing her doctorate degree in Evaluation and Applied Research at Claremont Graduate University. Sarah Mason is a Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Program Evaluation, The University of Melbourne where she has taught classes in quantitative methods and mixed methods for evaluation. Over the past 15 years, Sarah has led research and evaluation projects internationally around the globe. Sarah has an MA in Evaluation and Applied Research Methods from Claremont Graduate University (CGU) and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the same field. She regularly presents at international conferences and was recently awarded a Faster Forward Fund scholarship for innovative ideas in evaluation.

Dr. Jonathan Scaccia is a practicing community psychologist, COO with the Wandersman Group, and evaluation consultant. He was one of the initial developers of the R=MC2 readiness model and In 2017 he along with Dr. Abraham Wandersman and The SCALE Formative Evaluation Team, were awarded the AEA Outstanding Evaluation Award. We discuss the overlap between community psychology and program evaluation when it comes to helping others improve.

We speak with Kathleen Doll, a doctoral student at Claremont Graduate University who specializes in Democratic Evaluation approaches. We discuss how to be inclusive in our approaches to ensure everyone has a chance to have their voices heard.