What are the advantages and disadvantages of evaluation research?

Advantages:

- practical orientation

- can reveal whether policies work/do not work

- explains underlying logic behind the programme

- it can improve programme effectiveness

Disadvantages:

- conflicts of interests among stakeholders

- costs of evaluation: it diverts resources from the programme

- apart from possessing research skills, researcher has to play different roles: collaborator, trainer, group facilitator etc. in order to smooth conflicts of interest

- it is difficult to generalize based on evaluation results