The American Evaluation Association (AEA) is a professional association for evaluators and those with a professional interest in the field of evaluation

Evaluation

Evaluation is systematic determination of merit, worth, and significance of something or someone using criteria against a set of standards.Evaluation often is used to characterize and appraise subjects of interest in a wide range of human enterprises, including the arts, criminal justice,...

, including practitioner

Practitioner

A practitioner is someone who engages in an occupation, profession, religion, or way of life.Practitioner may refer to:* Medical practitioner* Justice practitioner* Solitary practitioner, in Wicca and Paganism...

s, faculty

Faculty (university)

A faculty is a division within a university comprising one subject area, or a number of related subject areas...

, students, funders, managers, and government decision-makers. As of 2009, AEA has approximately 5700 members from all 50 US states and over 60 other countries.

Mission

The American Evaluation Association's mission is to:

• Improve evaluation practices and methods
• Increase evaluation use
• Promote evaluation as a profession and
• Support the contribution of evaluation to the generation of theory and knowledge about effective human action.

Guiding Principles for Evaluators

AEA Publishes the AEA: Guiding Principles for Evaluators, which set expectations for evaluators in the areas of: (a) systematic inquiry, (b) competence

Skill

A skill is the learned capacity to carry out pre-determined results often with the minimum outlay of time, energy, or both. Skills can often be divided into domain-general and domain-specific skills...

, (c) integrity

Integrity

Integrity is a concept of consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations, and outcomes. In ethics, integrity is regarded as the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of one's actions...

/honesty, (d) respect for people, and (e) responsibilities for general and public welfare.

Publications

AEA sponsors two journals. The American Journal of Evaluation is published quarterly through SAGE Publications

SAGE Publications

SAGE is an independent academic publisher of books, journals, and electronic products in the humanities and social sciences and the scientific, technical, and medical fields. SAGE was founded in 1965 by George McCune and Sara Miller McCune. The company is headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California,...

 and includes individually peer-reviewed articles on a range of topics in the field. New Directions for Evaluation is a peer-reviewed thematic sourcebook

Sourcebook

The term sourcebook is used to describe many different kinds of books such as collections of core articles , bibliographies, biographies, printed archival sources, directories and so on...

 published quarterly through Jossey-Bass/Wiley

John Wiley & Sons

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., also referred to as Wiley, is a global publishing company that specializes in academic publishing and markets its products to professionals and consumers, students and instructors in higher education, and researchers and practitioners in scientific, technical, medical, and...

, with each issue focusing on a different topic or aspect of evaluation.

Topical Interest Groups

AEA has 41 topically-focused subgroups. Each subgroup develops a strand of content for the association’s annual conference, and works to build a community of practice through various means.

• Advocacy
  Advocacy
  Advocacy is a political process by an individual or a large group which normally aims to influence public-policy and resource allocation decisions within political, economic, and social systems and institutions; it may be motivated from moral, ethical or faith principles or simply to protect an...
  
   and Policy Change
• Alcohol, Drug Abuse
  Drug abuse
  Substance abuse, also known as drug abuse, refers to a maladaptive pattern of use of a substance that is not considered dependent. The term "drug abuse" does not exclude dependency, but is otherwise used in a similar manner in nonmedical contexts...
  
  , and Mental Health
• Assessment in Higher Education
  Higher education
  Higher, post-secondary, tertiary, or third level education refers to the stage of learning that occurs at universities, academies, colleges, seminaries, and institutes of technology...
  
  
• Business and Industry
• Cluster, Multi-Site and Multi-Level Evaluation
• Collaborative, Participatory & Empowerment Eval
• College Access Programs
• Costs, Effectiveness, Benefits, and Economics
• Crime and Justice
• Disaster and Emergency Management
  Emergency management
  Emergency management is the generic name of an interdisciplinary field dealing with the strategic organizational management processes used to protect critical assets of an organization from hazard risks that can cause events like disasters or catastrophes and to ensure the continuance of the...
  
   Evaluation
• Distance Education and Other Educational Tech
• Environmental Program Evaluation
• Evaluating the Arts and Culture
• Evaluation Managers and Supervisors
• Evaluation Use
• Extension Education Evaluation
• Feminist Issues in Evaluation
• Government Evaluation
• Graduate Student and New Evaluators
• Health Evaluation
• Human Services Evaluation
• Independent Consulting
• Indigenous
  Indigenous peoples
  Indigenous peoples are ethnic groups that are defined as indigenous according to one of the various definitions of the term, there is no universally accepted definition but most of which carry connotations of being the "original inhabitants" of a territory....
  
   Peoples in Evaluation
• Integrating Technology into Evaluation
• International and Cross-Cultural Evaluation
• Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender
  LGBT
  LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...
  
   Issues
• Multiethnic Issues in Evaluation
• Needs Assessment
• Non-Profits and Foundations Evaluation
• Organizational Learning and Evaluation Capacity Building
• Prek-12 Educational Evaluation
• Program Theory and Theory Driven Evaluation
• Qualitative Methods
• Quantitative Methods: Theory and Design
• Research on Evaluation
• Research, Technology, and Development Eval
• Social Work
• Special Needs
  Special needs
  In the USA, special needs is a term used in clinical diagnostic and functional development to describe individuals who require assistance for disabilities that may be medical, mental, or psychological. For instance, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the International...
  
  Populations
• Systems in Evaluation
• Teaching of Evaluation
• Theories of Evaluation

Merger of ERS and ENet

In 1986, the Evaluation Research Society and Evaluation Network merged to become the American Evaluation Association.