Anne Vo

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Keck School of Medicine USC

Stigma against fat people permeates every level of healthcare, yet most attempts to reduce weight stigma among healthcare providers have shown only marginal results. Fat studies, a field that rigorously interrogates negative assumptions about fatness, can help social psychologists understand weight stigma by centering the pathologization of fatness...

Internet surveys of American Evaluation Association (AEA) members are a common method for studying evaluation practice. Response rates obtained from Internet surveys of AEA members are, however, frequently very small. To investigate whether or not material incentives increase response rates to Internet surveys of AEA members, a between-subjects thr...

In 2016, the American Evaluation Association cosponsored a conference themed “impact convergence” with Social Value International, an international organization focusing on impact measurement in the context of social investment. These meetings spurred interest in the intersection between evaluation and impact measurement. We organized this forum in...

This chapter offers a retrospective analysis of literature related to evaluative thinking. The study was conducted to improve conceptual understandings of the topic through a systematic review of sources published from 1960 to 2016. Using manual, keyword, and proximity search strategies, the authors identified and thematically coded 220 records to...

The editors identify and synthesize salient themes on the topic of evaluative thinking that emerged throughout the chapters of this volume. In particular, they address three questions: (1) In what ways has this volume broadened and deepened our collective understanding of evaluative thinking? (2) What new directions of inquiry and action regarding...

Social impact investing is the use of private investment to fund social programs in various public welfare sectors. It is currently unclear which evaluative practices are used to determine the impact of social investment. This study describes how impact investments are evaluated and the factors that help explain variations in practice through surve...

The importance of context in shaping evaluation practice is broadly accepted. Still, there is much to be learned about context, and we remain at the early stages of this process. In this chapter, we describe a framework for organizing and focusing ideas for conducting research on evaluation context. We hope that this tool will be a source of inspir...

Research on evaluation theories, methods, and practices has increased considerably in the past decade. Even so, little is known about whether published findings from research on evaluation are read by evaluators and whether such findings influence evaluators’ thinking about evaluation or their evaluation practice. To address these questions, and ot...

While the evaluation field collectively agrees that contextual factors bear on evaluation practice and related scholarly endeavors, the discipline does not yet have an explicit framework for understanding evaluation context. To address this gap in the knowledge base, this paper explores the ways in which evaluation context has been addressed in the...

The act of valuing in an evaluation may be perceived in different ways. We consider the multiple theoretic perspectives that govern an evaluator's behavior and present a typology of evaluator valuing roles. Within this typology we describe three ways in which value judgments are typically reached—by stakeholders alone, stakeholders and evaluators i...

In this paper we describe an evaluation training program sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and led by Duquesne University and OMG Center for Collaborative Learning designed to meet the challenge of developing a cadre of diverse evaluation professionals, specifically those from traditionally underrepresented or underserved communities,...