Engaging Community, Sharing Leadership, And Enhancing Realist Evaluation Together: How to Build Partnerships Utilizing Big Data: From Human Service Agencies: Examples from England & New York State

This paper demonstrates how partnerships can be built between evaluators and service providers to enhance the utility of evaluation in practice in a longitudinal study that includes regular analyses of big data undertaken with the service providers.
Research methods drawn from both epidemiology and effectiveness research traditions are demonstrated in in partnership with human service agencies to investigate what programs of intervention work and for whom. AEA’s guiding principles help Evaluators and agencies to make the best use of the available data to continuously inform practice. This is an example of the emerging realist evaluation approach as this paradigm is usually not used in making the best use of big data. The evaluation including entire populations directly helps the agencies to better target their interventions, to promote equity and social justice, and to develop new strategies in the circumstances where the interventions are less successful.