Provide a Review of Cousins's Ideas Surrounding the Importance of Collaboration

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The Answer is Cousins emphasizes that engaging multiple stakeholders in a participatory manner and focusing on local, immediate needs will help stakeholders become invested in the evaluation and, therefore, they will be more likely to use the findings to promote change. Cousins defines multiple types of "use" that could result from a practical participatory evaluation project. First, process use refers to the changes within program staff (e.g., knowledge, skill development) and organizations (e.g., culture shifts) that stem from participating in an evaluation. This type of use is often referred to as the development of "evaluative thinking." Second, instrumental use is when the evaluation findings are directly used to inform a decision or contribute to solving a problem. In this type of use, there must be a clear, discernable link between the substantive results and a programmatic change (e.g., "because we found this, we decided to do that"). Finally, conceptual use is when the evaluation findings change how stakeholders think about a program or policy in a more general way (e.g., a new insight, a deeper understanding, new questions). In practical participatory evaluations, the goal is that all forms of use (process, instrumental, and conceptual) occur, but in a policy context, there is particular emphasis on promoting instrumental and conceptual use, as they are critical for policy change.
For instrumental and conceptual use to occur, policy makers need to be aware of evaluation findings and their implications. In practical participatory evaluations, stakeholders have been involved in the process of generating the work, but that is still no guarantee that the findings will be acted upon to generate change. To that end, bilateral models of engagement call for researchers to be embedded in policy work. This same idea has been percolating in policy studies since the 1990s when the concept of participatory policy analyses was introduced as a way of making public policy more relevant and responsive to needs of citizenry. It has been argued that public participation is critical to the success of a policy, and the scientific community is one sector of the public that often has relevant, empirically based information to guide policy development. Thus, the collaboration between researchers, practitioners, and policy makers must extend beyond the evaluation itself and create ways for researchers/evaluators to continue to be engaged throughout the next phases of policy development and implementation. This engagement can take many forms (e.g., participation in policy work groups, providing testimony in legislative hearings), and identifying and sharing successful strategies of such collaborations remains a pressing need in policy scholarship.

Provide a Review of Cousins's Ideas Surrounding the Importance of Collaboration

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