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Mathematica's Hargreaves Receives AEA's Promising New Evaluator Award
Awards Ceremony Scheduled at AEA Evaluation 2011 in Anaheim
Contact: Amy Berridge, (609) 945-3378
CAMBRIDGE, MASS—October 26, 2011—Margaret B. Hargreaves, a senior health researcher with Mathematica Policy Research, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will be honored with the American Evaluation Association’s (AEA) 2011 Marcia Guttentag Promising New Evaluator Award. A recognition ceremony will be held during Evaluation 2011, to be held Friday, November 4, in Anaheim, California. AEA is an international professional association that comprises more than 7,000 members worldwide. The Guttentag award is presented to a promising new evaluator during the first five years after completion of his or her Masters or Doctoral degree and whose work is consistent with AEA’s Guiding Principles for Evaluators.
“It is an honor to lead an association with the caliber of dedicated professionals like our award-winners,” says AEA president Jennifer Greene. “Their work demonstrates the substantial value of evaluation to diverse policy and program arenas in our society and around the globe.”
Hargreaves was nominated by Michael Quinn Patton, author of Utilization-Focused Evaluation and a former AEA president who served as her advisor. “Her dissertation was an evaluation of healthcare disparities in Minnesota. Since her doctoral work, she has worked full-time as a professional evaluator. I have followed her development as a highly competent and respected evaluator with great interest and, I confess, considerable pride. I have advised more than 50 doctoral students over the years. Only three have gone on to stellar evaluation careers.”
Hargreaves, the mother of a college student herself, also brings more than 20 years experience with state and local government in Minnesota first as an EEOC investigator for a state human rights agency, then as a management analyst and then a public health planning supervisor. Firsthand experiences within the system prompted her decision to return to graduate school. “I decided that if I learned more about evaluation, I might be able to use it more effectively to make more of a difference in policy areas that I cared about, such as health disparities.”
Hargreaves, who has considerable experience as a professional trainer of systems evaluation – in both face-to-face seminars as well as online webinars – in 2010 wrote Evaluating System Change: A Planning Guide that is used in graduate courses at Harvard, by the University of Chicago Medical and Social Service Administration Schools, and other institutions including the National Institutes of Health and the Living Cities’ consortium of foundations.
Hargreaves is a 1980 graduate of Carleton College, earned a masters (1989) in Social Welfare Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and her Ph.D. (2006) in Health Disparities at Union Institute and University. At Mathematica, she oversees and/or is involved with national evaluations of the Healthy Weight Collaborative, the Combating Autism Act Initiative, the National HIV Clinician Workforce Study, and the Supporting Evidence-Based Home Visiting Initiative.
“These days, many people go through several careers before they retire,” notes Hargreaves. “As a result, people can be “new” to a profession at any point in their life. In many ways, I fit the mold of a new evaluation professional. I am still learning the fundamentals of being a project director on national evaluations. I have to go to “new project director” trainings with people in their 20s, fresh out of grad school. I have to learn the tricks of evaluation budgeting, how to write reports in the company’s style and format, and how and when to go through IRB and OMB processes, etc.
“At the same time, I became a full-time evaluator at this stage in my life on a mission. In my last two decades of work, I want to make work easier for program managers and evaluators by helping to end the “disconnect” between simple, linear planning and evaluation approaches and the complexity of real life.”
Hargreaves is currently program co-chair of AEA’s Systems in Evaluation Topical Interest Group and an associate of the Human Systems Dynamics Institute.
“I am honored to receive this award and value its recognition of my work, especially in complex systems evaluation.”
For more information on AEA, visit www.eval.org.
About Mathematica: Mathematica Policy Research, a nonpartisan research firm, provides a full range of research and data collection services, including program evaluation and policy research, survey design and data collection, research assessment and interpretation, and program performance/data management, to improve public well-being. Its clients include federal and state governments, foundations, and private-sector and international organizations. The employee-owned company, with offices in Princeton, N.J., Ann Arbor, Mich., Cambridge, Mass., Chicago, Ill., Oakland, Calif., and Washington, D.C., has conducted some of the most important studies of health care, education, international, disability, family support, employment, nutrition, and early childhood policies and programs.