Emergent design: Understanding and evolving measures of a family support system☆

Emergent design suggests that evaluators adapt their inquiry process as they come to understand the object of an evaluation better. This article provides a case study of the use of emergent design in the evaluation of a family support program. It traces the emergence of evaluation procedures through three phases. At each stage it portrays the evaluation problem, the procedures used to understand the program and presents the results of that stage of the analysis. This instance of emergent design produced, in two phases, data that policy makers found highly useful, though the third stage proved less useful. Impact upon policy making was substantial.