¶ … agency have prevented this situation? In this case, the program staff is very confused and anxious about the routine collection of demographic information by the federal government, which almost certainly has nothing to do with the actual content of their training manual. It sounds like they simply were unaware that collection of such information was one of the conditions of their funding, or that they were concentrating so much on their 'real' work that they ignored this requirement. They were therefore negligent in their duties, by not ensuring they were adequately informed about the need to collect basic demographic information from all participants at the start of the project. Even worse, they are about to compound the problem greatly by committing an act of academic fraud, supplying false information about ages, incomes and other factors. In fact, the head of the project is at fault because she did not notice that the new evaluation form requested this data, since the form they used the previous year did not require it.

2. What appears to be the scope and purpose of the federal evaluation? Why did this cause such a situation? Why should you take scope and purpose into account when designing an evaluation?

Part of the evaluation concerns what they did in the workshops, but this is not a problem for the staff...

In addition, the federal evaluators want demographic data so that they compare it with all the other projects that they funded. By law, they are required to report to Congress and the executives of their own agencies how many people were in the program in any particular fiscal year. For this reason "they want the ages of trainees, their sex, their employment, their income -- all the demographic stuff." Many federal agencies collect and share this demographic data, such as the Bureau of the Census, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Health Interview Survey and the National Center of Health Statistics. This includes data on ages, incomes, disabilities, illnesses and health services utilization, which will be shared with various administrative agencies (Siegal, 2002, p. 131).
3. What issues and challenges did the staff face? What issues and challenges might the evaluator face? How should the staff deal with this situation?

The staff is very concerned that the federal evaluator will grade them on what they did, but they do not have to be concerned about this since they have records about the interventions that took place in the workshops. Of course, they could have no way of knowing about how many people watched it on television…