Counseling Program Evaluation: A Key Pathway Through Implementation, Improvement, and Social Change

Abstract

In the next decade, our communities will be looking for ways to heal, grow, and flourish from the deleterious effects of historical inequities, an international pandemic, and a changing planet. Counselors can make unique contributions within these ventures, not just as direct service providers, but as those individuals who identify local-level needs by amplifying historically excluded voices and making complex data plainly understood; identifying and centering existing resources and assets; promoting inclusive planning early and often in a program’s lifecycle; supporting accountability through implementation monitoring; representing outputs and outcomes with transparency and in ways that are accessible to the nonscientific community; contextualizing impact across the ecology of human development; and establishing a program’s successes and growth opportunities as the foundation for value-added advocacy efforts. These may sound like weighty charges, but we are all involved in evaluations and evaluative thinking. When we toss a ball of paper to the bin, we watch to see if we’ve sunk the shot. When we pour a cup of coffee, we get a sense of the temperature before enjoying that bean-based sunshine. While there has always been a need for the systematic use of social science research methods to identify the practical value of programs to their stakeholders, the increased integration of counseling interventions into the fabric of community, education, and hospital-based interventions has cued a watershed moment for counselors to regard the inclusion of program evaluation theories and practices as integral features of our professional identity. Counselors’ training provides a unique foundation for conceptualizing the ecological context within which programs attempt to promote the development and well-being of individuals, groups, and communities across the lifespan. However, many preparation programs across behavioral health professions are not designed to bridge that potential with the evaluation-oriented theories, skills, and experiences that may optimize the potential for meeting community needs. It does not have to be this way. Through personal inquiry, continuing education, specialized training, facilitated engagement, and intentional advocacy efforts, counselors can increase their representation among the ranks of those who complete program evaluations. Make no mistake, whether identifying as evaluation scientists, impact evaluators, or just plainly, counselors who do program evaluation, we all have important roles in defining the pathway through representation of an implementation efforts value, opportunities for program improvement, and the related social changes. In 2017, Counseling Outcome Research and Evaluation (CORE) featured a new Outcome-Based Program Evaluation submission category and has since shown commitment to the associated spirit by publishing articles related to program evaluation methods (Prosek, 2020) and demonstrations (Ikonomopoulos et al., 2021; Schwarz et al., 2020). This issue of CORE represents a continued commitment to counselors as program evaluators through https://doi.org/10.1080/21501378.2022.2029411