Patricia and Jane have been enthusiastically discussing evaluation since the 1997 American Evaluation Association conference in San Diego when they were both living in the United States. There was a fairly instantaneous meeting of minds, and their exchanges and collaborations have grown over the years. Both share a commitment to improving the quality of evaluation, an unwillingness to accept credentials or power as a substitute for quality, and an international approach from a distinctly Southern Hemisphere perspective.
Patricia Rogers is Professor of Public Sector Evaluation at RMIT University (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), Melbourne, Australia. Jane is Director of Real Evaluation Ltd., an evaluation consulting business based in Auckland, New Zealand.
Patricia Rogers returned home to Australia in 1998 after a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University with Professor Carol Weiss.
Patricia has worked in public sector evaluation and research for more than 25 years, across a wide range of program areas (including agriculture, community development, criminal justice, early childhood, education, health promotion, and Indigenous housing)and levels of government (national, state and local).
In addition to her work in Australia with Federal, State and Local governments, the Australian Research Alliance on Children and Youth, and Changemakers Australia, she has worked on projects with Department of Labour (New Zealand), Development Bank of Southern Africa (South Africa), Health Scotland (UK), Ministry of Education (Singapore), Ministry of Education (New Zealand), Ministry of Finance (Malaysia), Network Of Networks on Impact Evaluation (NONIE), Office of the Presidency (South Africa), Public Service Commission (South Africa), United Nations Development Program, World Bank Institute (USA). Patricia has presented keynote addresses at conferences of the Australasian, Aotearoa/New Zealand, European, United Kingdom, South African and Swedish evaluation societies and associations, and taught short courses in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, and USA. She has been awarded the American Evaluation Association’s Myrdal Award for Evaluation Practice, the Australasian Evaluation Society’s Evaluation Training and Services Award for outstanding contributions to the profession of evaluation, the AES Caulley-Tulloch Prize for Pioneering Literature in Evaluation, and led the team that was awarded the AES ‘Best Evaluation Study’ Award for the evaluation of the Stronger Families and Communities Strategy 2000-2004.
Her most recent publications have focused on the challenges in evaluating complicated and complex interventions for program theory evaluation and impact evaluation. Her previous work on accountability, program theory, and organizational improvement was published in the Encyclopedia of Evaluation, New Directions for Evaluation, and the Sage Handbook of Evaluation. She is currently writing a book with Sue Funnell on program theory, theories of change and logic models.
Patricia lives in the Australian bush on the edge of Melbourne with her husband, Paul, and her two handsome, blue-eyed sons.
Jane Davidson returned home to Aotearoa (New Zealand) in 2004 from the United States, where she served as Associate Director of the internationally recognized Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University. There, she launched and directed the world’s first fully interdisciplinary Ph.D. in evaluation, spanning the Colleges of Arts & Science, Education, Engineering & Applied Science, and Health & Human Services. She currently runs a successful evaluation consulting business, working across a range of domains including leadership development, human resources, health, education, and social policy. Her work includes evaluation training and development, facilitated self-evaluation and capacity building, independent evaluation, formative and summative meta-evaluation (advice, support, coaching, and critical reviews of evaluation plans or evaluations).
Jane is author of Evaluation Methodology Basics: The Nuts and Bolts of Sound Evaluation (2004, Sage Publications), which is used internationally as a graduate text and practitioners’ guidebook. She was 2005 recipient of the American Evaluation Association’s Marcia Guttentag Award, awarded to a promising new evaluator within five years of completing their doctorate. Jane received her Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University (California) in organizational behavior with substantial emphasis on evaluation.
Jane has presented numerous keynote addresses and professional development workshops internationally, including those for the American Evaluation Association, the UK Evaluation Society, the Evaluator’s Institute (U.S.A.), the Aotearoa New Zealand Evaluation Association, and the University of South Africa.
Because it’s traditional in New Zealand to include one’s roots as part of any introduction …
Jane is a 6th generation Pakeha (New Zealander of European descent) descended on her father’s side from Scottish railway workers and on her mother’s side from English farmers. She currently lives in Tamaki Makaurau (Auckland, NZ’s biggest city), in the lands of the Ngāti Whatua (our local Māori/indigenous) people. Jane was the first generation in her family to go to university. Her husband, Susumu, is a marketing/strategy specialist who helps kiwi companies crack the Japanese market, and they have three bilingual/bicultural poppets – Kiri (5), Ema and Mariko (2-year-old twins). Jane spent four years living and working in Tokyo (1991-95) and speaks reasonable Japanese.
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