Evaluation Implementation – 3.02 Synthesize and Interpret Data
If your data have a story to tell, this stage will be exciting. All the work you’ve done – to gather high-quality data, organize and clean it, develop summaries and explanations from the data — brings you (at last!) to the point of being able to learn something and draw conclusions from your evaluation. If you have used both quantitative and qualitative data collection tools separately, at this stage, you may be bringing together the different sets of results in a synthesis.
It is important at this stage, as has been true at many points before now, to include other people and particularly some stakeholders in the synthesis and interpretation stage. Stakeholders bring their own perspectives and information on the program; their participation in this task can improve and enhance your interpretations considerably. (It may also contribute to their ultimate “buy-in” on the reports or recommendations that emerge from all this work.) Stakeholders can also be helpful in identifying who the results should be shared with or, more generally, who might be interested in hearing about the results of the evaluation. It can also be useful to include some relative outsiders, for the sake of objectivity and genuinely different perspectives on the program.