Community Development Journal Advance Access originally published online on June 8, 2006
Community Development Journal 2007 42(3):348-364; doi:10.1093/cdj/bsl011
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Improving community health through evaluations
Address for correspondence: email: joanna{at}groundplan.net
There has been an increasing emphasis on sustainable community development in recent years, which is linked to community health through quality of life and intergenerational considerations. Evaluations are one of the basic tools to improving community health with the most effective evaluations being those that are meaningful to the community itself, and which provide tangible feedback and incentives for improved performance. Drawing on well-known methods, this paper illustrates four important components of community evaluations. Although each method incorporates some or all of these components, their achievements to date have been limited. The reasons for this, as well as how evaluations can play a more effective role in improving community health, are discussed.