Call for Papers

8th International Conference on Evaluation for Practice
June 18–20, 2012, City of Pori, Finland

'Evaluation as a Tool for Research, Learning and Making Things Better' – A Conference for Experts of Education, Human Services, and Policy

Conference Context

We cordially invite abstracts for papers, interactive research sessions and posters for the 8th International Conference on Evaluation for Practice to be held in the City of Pori, Finland on June 18–20, 2012.

The conference carries on a tradition that started in 1995 in Huddersfield, England. The focus of the conferences has been on evaluation research with implications for practice in the fields of social work, education, health and other human services. Since then the significance of evaluation research has grown and revived rapidly and the 8th conference broadens the themes to cover evaluation research in the working life and regional activities, including the evaluation of the regional engagement of the universities.

Conference Themes Presented

The theme of the conference “Evaluation as a Tool for Research, Learning and Making Things Better” emphasizes the pursuit to use the results of evaluation research in the improvement of human services and other organizational life in a situation where the continuously changing needs and contexts also change the practices. Learning is seen as one important prerequisite for making changes in the practices and the understanding of performance is extensive, covering impacts for clients and customers, service quality and effectiveness. Parallel to this, the conference aims to explore the various theoretical and methodological approaches to evaluation to gather a versatile picture of the current research, including both qualitative and quantitative methods, evaluation at micro or macro levels and also the potential of selfevaluation. The conference gives the most uptodate knowledge on the evaluation work in practice. A new thinking of the field of evaluation is recalled.

According to the conference tradition, we invite researchers and practitioners from around the world to share their experiences in this challenging mixture of research and practice. The conference offers an opportunity for the researchers as well as for decisionmakers (municipality, regional and national levels), social workers, nurses, and teachers, the experts of the development of working life and regions and other practitioners to learn from each other, according to the goal to facilitate communication between researchers and practitioners globally.

• Complementary perspectives and methods on practice evaluation
• Evidence based practices and their problematics
• Systematic reviews and their use in human services
• Evaluation on health services
• Evaluation in the development of working life / workplace development
• Evaluation on regional development practices