Posavac and Carey (1993) defines programme evaluation as a collection of methods, skills and sensitivities necessary to determine whether a human service is needed and likely to be used; whether it is sufficiently intense to meet the need identified; whether the service is offered as planned; and whether the human service actually does help people in need without undesirable side effects. Similarly, Potter (1999) sees programme evaluation research being about establishing whether social programmes are needed, effective and likely to be used.According to The Joint Committee for Educational Evaluation, programme evaluations are systematic investigations of the worth or merit of some objects. For OECD, they are "systematic, analytic assessments addressing important aspects of a programme and its value, and seeking reliability and usability of findings". Rossi (1993) delineate programme evaluation or evaluation research as the systematic application of social research procedures for assessing the conceptualization, design, implementation and utility of social intervention programmes. In Cronbach's (1963) view, it simply means providing information for decision making, while for Heiman (1995), it is a variety of procedures for developing and evaluating interventions.
To that end, the obscurity of the term "programme evaluation" could be descried. Taking all the definitions and conceptions of programme evaluation into consideration, it appears that the term has an imprecise meaning. This is, however, not surprising because programme evaluations vary in the nature of the social issues involved, in the perspectives taken on the issues, in the geographic scope of the services to be reviewed and in the kinds of information sought (Greene, 1994). The evaluations also vary in terms of the stated purposes or for which the information will be used. As Chelimsky (in Rossi, 1993) observes, evaluations may be undertaken for a variety of reasons:
- For management and administrative purposes
- To assess the appropriateness of program changes
- To meet the accountability requirements of funding groups
- For planning and policy purposes
- To test innovative ideas on how to deal with human and community problems
- To decide whether to expand or curtail programs
- To support advocacy of one program over another
- To test a particular social science hypothesis or a principle of professional practice
Potter and Kruger (2001), however, hold that there are two main purposes that this type of research is conducted with: "to consider issues and questions concerning the development of social programmes and to analyze evidence about the impact of social programmes in order to answer specific questions about its development" (p. 190).
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