Abstract
It is a pleasure to introduce this issue of the American Journal of Evaluation, one that includes one Method Note Section article, three featured articles, two articles in the Experimental Methodology Section, our third of four Special Sections on Positionality, and a Book Review. In addition, the issue closes with a Forum essay from the current president of the American Evaluation Association (AEA) in preparation for the AEA 2026 Fall Conference.
First, the Method Note Section article, Research on Evaluation (RoE) Studies Published in AJE: An Integrative Review of Themes, Methods, and Quality, by Selam Stephanos and Stewart Donaldson, provides an integrative review of 117 RoE studies published over a 10-year period between 2014 and 2024. By addressing an age-old definitional challenge in the field and the uneven distribution of topics and methodological approaches in RoE scholarship, the authors examine key topics, methods, and quality over time. Adapting typologies from the Joanna Briggs Institute levels of evidence framework and the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool, the authors share implications for the evaluation field that reflects RoE in AJE, including areas of progress and areas for improvement.
All three of the featured articles in this issue suggest frameworks, and it is our hope that publishing them adjacent to one another will add value for AJE’s readers as they grapple with systematizing—through these and similar frameworks—how we conduct evaluation. The first one of these—Toward Disability-Led Evaluation: A Continuum Framework for Centering Disability in Evaluation Practice by Anthony Plotnerthe—addresses an of issue the inclusion of marginalized communities, such as people with disabilities, in the evaluation process. Plotner argues that disability has been at the periphery of mainstream evaluation models, and conventional approaches tend to reflect deficit-oriented assumptions and the illegitimacy of disabled persons. The article proposes a continuum of disability engagement designed to guide the evaluation of programs, services, or systems related to disabled individuals and communities. Plotner offers both principles and tensions for evaluators to consider in carrying out disability-led evaluations, including applications that show how disability-led evaluations exist in a continuum.
The second featured article—Process Evaluation of Teams: A Revised Framework for Use in Extension by Jeantyl Norze, Cristina Connolly, and Stacey Stearns—offers a timely and prescient article on the context of program evaluation in modern Extension work and among Extension Education professionals. The article tests the framework across key components of the Extension process (content, reach, recruitment, dose delivered and received, quality, participant responsiveness, facilitation, context and complexity). The results suggest implications for the application of the process framework for Extension teams and future research.
The third featured article—Evaluating Fidelity Frameworks in Health Interventions: A Scoping Review of Conceptual, Implementation, and Adaptation Models by Evangelia Zacharia, Konstantinos Tambalis, and Manolis Adamakis—addresses a cross-section of issues related to evaluation, implementation science, and fidelity in health interventions, aimed to improve health outcomes, prevent disease, and increase the quality and efficiency of healthcare services. By mapping fidelity-related frameworks used to design, implement, and evaluate health interventions from 2015 to 2025, the scoping review compares 17 frameworks across key dimensions—fidelity, adaptation, context, evaluation, and temporal orientation. The authors suggest that this article is a harbinger to a new generation of fidelity frameworks, both integrative and adaptive to the evolving nature of implementation.
The following two sections in this issue include contextualizing editorials by the Section Editors, and we refer the reader to those for insights on how best to consume the articles’ content.
Next is Emmanuel Ojo’s book review of Equitable Evaluation: Voices from the Global South by Steven Masvaure, Takunda Chirau, Tebogo Fish, and Candice Morkel, a collection of perspectives from evaluation scholars and practitioners from the African continent. Ojo contends that this book will resonate with evaluators, development practitioners, researchers, policy makers, and educators committed to equity and justice in the Global South. The focal book challenges technocratic and Global North-centric frameworks and calls for context-driven, participatory evaluation practices, especially those that place African epistemologies and voices at the center of evaluation theory and practice.
To close this issue, we feature AEA President Guili Zhang’s essay on the AEA 2026 Fall Conference theme, Evaluation Across Boundaries: Building an Unshakable Future for Evaluation through Rigor, Relevance, and Reach. Zhang contends that the conference title is more than a theme but a practical strategy for looking back and for looking forward to a future of the field, on being more resilient through rigor, relevance, and reach across methods, disciplines, sectors, communities, cultures, and generations. We look forward to seeing you at the conference in the Fall!
