Making Evaluations Relevant to Congressional Needs

To improve the use of evaluation or research by legislators, efforts must be made to address two basic kinds of problems: (1) the inattention of researchers and evaluators to the public use of their work, generally, and to the information needs and priorities of legislators, in particular; and (2) communication problems between researchers and legislators because of their isolation from each other and their different perspectives. The GAO evaluation strategy for working with Congress contains the following elements: (1) negotiating the question in terms of the information needed; (2) learning more about the evaluative information needs of legislative users; (3) developing and testing a panoply of evaluative tools for use with Congress; (4) briefing congressional staff and continuing communication on progress; and (5) evaluating work with congressional committee staff. These five elements furnish the essential components of the GAO approach toward trying to increase the use of evaluative findings by Congress. The shape of this approach, which is focused on the information needs of the user rather than the evaluative interests of the producer, has evolved from an effort to avoid or address the problems encountered between legislative users and evaluators in the past. The strategy is based on the belief that routinization of the direct linkage of the evaluation to the user need, and continuous communication between the sponsor and evaluator should lead to: (1) more relevance and timeliness in the evaluation product; (2) no reduction in evaluative quality; (3) a gradually increasing understanding of the evaluative process by the legislative user; (4) more satisfaction on the part of the user; and (5) improved congressional use of evaluative findings.