Implementation Monitoring and Process Evaluation

This practical guide helps readers understand and use the steps that program planners and evaluators take in implementing and monitoring a new program, policy, or practice in an organizational setting. The book covers the entire process, from planning, to carrying out the plan, and summarizing, reporting, and using the results. A wide range of real-world examples in the book are drawn from health, education, non-profit organizations, and public administration, and an extended case study, Your Turn boxes, and worksheet templates help readers apply concepts to their own projects. Ideal for practitioners, researchers, and students, this book can be used as a primary text for a process evaluation or an implementation monitoring course or as a supplemental text in a broader program evaluation course.

Across the whole text it is clear that the author has been there. The manuscript is filled with concrete and grounded tips for being successful at doing this ‘messy’ work.

Ruth P. Saunders, PhD, is an professor emerita in the Department of Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior in the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Saunders has 25 years of research and practice experience in conducting program, policy, and practice change in organizational settings, including preschools, schools, after-school settings, children’s group homes, and faith-based settings. Her roles in these projects, which include eight large-scale interventions, have encompassed using multi-level conceptual models to develop a comprehensive model of organizational environments, constructing scales and indexes to assess contextual factors and implementation processes, addressing challenges involved in intervention design and implementation in field-based settings, and designing and carrying comprehensive intervention implementation monitoring. She has authored or co-authored numerous publications based on her research. Dr. Saunders also has 28 years of teaching experience with master’s and doctoral level courses in program planning, program evaluation, process evaluation and implementation monitoring, and interventions targeting physical and social environments.