Explaining Organizational Variety in Evaluation Quality Assurance: Which Conditions Matter?

Abstract

The growth in evaluation practice has not always gone hand in hand with an increase in the actual quality of these evaluations. This article addresses this concern, by examining the factors that explain organizational variety in the application of evaluation quality assurance measures. We present the results of an analysis of 18 Flemish (Belgian) public sector organizations. To unravel different explanatory trajectories, we combine two comparative methods that rely on Boolean analysis: the most similar different outcome/most different similar outcome technique on the one hand, and crisp set qualitative comparative analysis on the other hand.

Keywords:

• policy evaluation
• quality assurance
• QCA
• Boolean methods

Notes

1. ¹The minimization process of the parsimonious solutions yielded 13 contradictory simplifying assumptions. These were solved on the basis of the knowledge about the necessary conditions in the analysis. We followed the approach explained in Delreux and Hesters (2010).