Introduction
Federal agencies often have experience with building and using evidence to design, manage, and improve their work on behalf of the public. All agencies, regardless of their experience level, can benefit from assessing their capacity to build and apply evidence in their work. The brief presents a snapshot of an evidence capacity framework that draws on research literature supplemented with interviews and focus groups with federal staff.
Purpose
The evidence capacity framework aims to help federal agencies and other organizations develop a shared understanding of the dimensions of capacity described in the literature. Developing this shared understanding is a step toward identifying areas of organizational strength and weakness and making plans to develop or deepen specific evidence capacities. Organizations can use the framework to guide an assessment of their evidence capacity.
Key Findings and Highlights
This brief provides a snapshot of a framework for evidence capacity. The brief introduces the framework’s five dimensions:
- Evidence culture, demonstrated as an organization that routinely uses evidence to support the organization’s mission, objectives, and program and policy choices.
- Evidence infrastructure, shown through use of evidence-related tools, resources, routines, and processes that form an infrastructure to build and use evidence timely and efficiently.
- Engagement, which involves having systems and processes to promote collaboration within and across internal and external audiences.
- Human capital, described as the knowledge, skills, and abilities of the organization’s staff to build evidence and communicate about it, as well as the opportunities for staff to develop this expertise.
- Leadership, depicted through leaders who foster an evidence culture, identify opportunities to build evidence, allocate time and resources to evidence activities, and make decisions transparently informed by evidence.
The framework, then, organizes components by the individual, interpersonal, or organizational levels. A graphic with three concentric circles depicts these levels and identifies the relevant components by dimension. Most components pertain to evidence capacity at the organizational level, with a few components at the interpersonal level and one component at the individual level. This suggests that much of evidence capacity is driven by organizational efforts and cannot be sustained by a few trained individuals in a silo.
Methods
To develop the evidence capacity framework, the team searched for literature published from 2006—2021 that addressed evidence capacity or evaluation capacity. The search identified 49 sources that described an evidence capacity framework or components of a framework. The sources consist of research studies of capacity building and toolkits and guidance to help organizations build evidence capacity. This brief describes the methods used to inform development of the framework.
Citation
Mastri, Annalisa, Heather Gordon, Ruth Neild, Elizabeth Alberty, Heather Zaveri, Megan McCormick, Veronica Sotelo Munoz, and Lance Bitner-Laird (2022). Evidence Capacity in Organizations: A Snapshot of a Literature-Informed Framework. OPRE Report # 2022-XX, Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Glossary
- Evidence:
- Facts, data, research, evaluation, or other information collected and used systematically to understand the effectiveness or efficiency of an organization’s work, or to understand the context or communities in which an organization conducts its work.
- Evidence capacity:
- Knowledge, skills, behaviors, and resources that support an agency’s ability to build and use evidence to make decisions and inform its work.