Using ethnography in the evaluation of drug prevention and intervention programs

As more community-based substance-misuse prevention and intervention programs are funded by government and private agencies, innovative evaluation designs are required. Traditional impact or outcome evaluations based on quantitative experimental designs are not enough. Without discarding the use of statistically analyzed survey instruments, a triangulate evaluation approach centered on ethnographic fieldwork has proven successful in fulfilling this need. This paper discusses changing attitudes about ethnography in the evaluation field, describes the development and usefulness of ethnography in evaluation research, and reports on the incorporation of ethnography as part of a triangulation evaluation design as used by National Development and Research Institutes, Inc.