Evaluation Exemplar: The Critical Importance of Stakeholder Relations in a National, Experimental Abstinence Education Evaluation

Evaluation studies are often considered exemplary because of the quality of their designs, but it is well known that a common--and often necessary--aspect of outstanding studies is stakeholder involvement. Furthermore, the implementation of designs and the nature of stakeholder involvement depend in large part on political and ideological contexts. The evaluation that the authors describe and discuss in this paper is an exemplar of a study with a high-quality design and intensive stakeholder involvement within a highly charged political environment. The study examined sexual abstinence education, an approach that has been widely discussed in many media for about the past 10 years. The study's methods were widely lauded, and its results were accepted by stakeholders across the ideological spectrum. In this Exemplars section entry, the authors describe the evaluation and the evaluated programs, provide additional material about the study in the form of an interview of the evaluation's two lead authors (Trenholm and Devaney) by the section editors (Brandon and Smith), and provide their collaborative reflections on the study. (Contains 1 note.)