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Kate McKegg
Kate has amassed a wealth of experience undertaking and managing evaluation projects and strategies in the New Zealand public sector. Kate has worked on, participated in, or managed dozens of evaluations in the last ten years. She has developed both a broad mix and range of methodological skills and experience and an in-depth knowledge of mixed-method evaluation practice. Kate was raised in New Zealand, Norfolk Island and Australia, and has spent her adult life between Australia and New Zealand, although she has remained in New Zealand since 1989. Kate’s three children Jess (20) William (17) and Patrick (8) provide her with life sustenance and focus, and in her spare time, Kate likes to go to the gym, walk, bike, swim, ski, read, and spend time with wider family and friends. Presentation Title: Using evaluative inquiry to generate useful, high quality knowledge One of the key concerns of this workshop is to better understand the linkages and connections between the generation of information from research or evaluation, and the transfer of this information to the community or to practitioners – in order to ultimately have a positive impact on the outcomes and results being achieved for citizens. The key challenge being posed, as I see it, is how to transfer research (or evaluation) based information and the knowledge created in a research contexts, including the more generalized knowledge associated with reporting and dissemination (‘know about’) into the ‘working knowledge’(‘know how’) of the community or practitioners. From an evaluation perspective, thinking about this challenge has been generated largely out of concern about evaluation use. As early as 1980, Lee Cronbach (1980), one of the most well known evaluators, was talking about the problem of use. Over more than 20 years, many perspectives and voices have contributed to a multi-dimensional conceptualization of evaluation use (Caracelli et al, 2000). Yet still, more than two decades later, use is a key issue for evaluation. In my own country of New Zealand, there is recent evidence in both policy communities and local communities of continuing lack of uptake or response to evaluation (State Services Commission, 2003), as well as examples of out right hostility to research and evaluation, particularly in our indigenous communities (Cram, 2003). It is my view that part of the way out of this rather intractable problem of apparent lack-luster response, uptake or use being made of research and evaluation effort, is to (i) re-conceptualize how we think about knowledge and how knowledge ‘happens’, (ii) re-examine our notions of practice; and (iii) re-explore what this might mean for how we undertake research and/or evaluation. In this paper, and drawing on examples from my own work in New Zealand, I will examine the very notion of knowledge transfer itself. I want to unpack some of the assumptions that seem to me to underpin the notion of ‘transfer’, and suggest a re-framing. I argue for explicitly repositioning practice, not as something that needs ‘adding to’ or as something in need of ‘improvement’, but as the critical site of knowledge creation (Schwandt, 2005). Finally, I will then draw our attention to the concept and practice of evaluative inquiry as a key mechanism or vehicle for generating high quality, useful, ‘working’ knowledge among communities and evaluators (Shulha, 2000). |
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Kate has worked in the field of social research and evaluation since the late 1980s. She has a Masters of Social Policy from Massey University, (Albany, New Zealand) and is a PhD candidate with Victoria University (Wellington, New Zealand). Her first roles were teaching research methods at Massey University (Albany, New Zealand) and undertaking labour market analysis as an analyst with Statistics New Zealand. Since the mid 1990s, her work has focused on evaluation, beginning with the New Zealand Employment Service and the Labour Market Policy Group of the Department of Labour. From 1998 to 1999 she was manager of the Programme and Services Evaluation team in Te Puni Kokiri (Ministry of Maori Development), and from 1999 to 2002 she managed the Centre for Operational Research and Evaluation (CORE) for Work and Income and the Ministry of Social Development in Wellington, New Zealand. Since 2002, Kate has run her own Research and Evaluation Company, The Knowledge Institute Ltd.