Tell it to Me Straight: The Benefits (and Struggles) of a Consumer-driven Assessment Process

Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR), where consumers participate in the design and execution of an evaluation, holds promise for increasing the validity and usefulness of evaluations of services. However, there is no literature comparing methods and outcomes of studies conducted by professional evaluators with those conducted through a consumer-driven evaluation process. We attempt to fill this gap by presenting the methods and results from a qualitative evaluation conducted by professional evaluators along with one conducted by a team of consumer researchers who engaged in a CBPR process. This paper includes: (a) methods, and findings that emerged from these evaluations each tasked with examining similar issues within the same community; (b) description of the process used to train the team of consumer researchers whose economic and educational backgrounds are different than most evaluators; and (c) lessons learned about how to prepare for and work with common barriers to implementing a CBPR evaluation.