Evaluation in the Youth Field: Theoretical Framework for Evaluating Implementation of the Youth Goals

This publication brings together current evaluation theories with an ambitious purpose of making the evaluation as such into a more widely understood and subsequently also a more frequently used tool in the youth sector. Wide audience is necessary in order to achieve this goal: practitioners, policymakers, youth researchers, as well as wide public. Practitioners may find evaluation useful when critically approaching their own everyday practice in order to both collect evidence of quality work and improving when necessary. Policymakers may get inspired and put evaluation mechanisms in place as part of the policy implementation phase, therefore enabling the evaluation to serve as continuous tool to provide evidence and help optimize as well as assess the implementation process as well as the policy itself. Youth researchers may appreciate another viewpoint on the research methods they are already familiar with and utilize them in a different way than usual next time they design a research project. And the wide public, particularly young people as beneficiaries of the youth policy measures, may strengthen their understanding and critical thinking on existent policies and the debates around them.