Real Evaluation (formerly, Davidson Consulting Ltd.) was founded in 1997 by owner and director Dr. E. Jane Davidson:
- 2005 winner of the American Evaluation Association’s Marcia Guttentag Award
- author of Evaluation Methodology Basics: The nuts and bolts of sound evaluation (Sage Publications, 2004)
- co-blogger (with Patricia Rogers) on the Genuine Evaluation Blog
- co-editor (with Michael Scriven and Chris Coryn) of the free-access online Journal of Multidisciplinary Evaluation
Jane returned home to Aotearoa (New Zealand) in 2004 from the United States, where she had served as Associate Director of the internationally recognized Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University. There, she helped launch and then directed the world’s first fully interdisciplinary Ph.D. in evaluation, spanning the Colleges of Arts & Science, Education, Engineering & Applied Science, and Health & Human Services, and now including WMU’s Haworth College of Business.
Jane is author of Evaluation Methodology Basics: The Nuts and Bolts of Sound Evaluation (2004, Sage Publications), which is used internationally as a graduate text and practitioners’ guidebook. She was 2005 recipient of the American Evaluation Association’s Marcia Guttentag Award, awarded to a promising new evaluator within five years of completing their doctorate. Jane received her Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University (California) in organizational behavior with substantial emphasis on evaluation; an MA in psychology from Victoria University of Wellington; and a Diploma of Teaching from the Christchurch College of Education. As part of the rigorous doctoral program at CGU, she studied with some of the leading theorists and practitioners in evaluation and management, including Drs. Michael Scriven (her dissertation chair), Peter Drucker and Vijay Sathe.
Jane has presented several keynote addresses internationally, including those for the UK Evaluation Society, the Education Review Office‘s National Conference and a number of US and NZ regional evaluation events. She will be one of the three keynotes at the Australasian Evaluation Society conference in September 2010. Jane has also delivered numerous highly successful public evaluation workshops for The Evaluator’s Institute, the American Evaluation Association, the University of South Africa, the Aotearoa New Zealand Evaluation Association and the Knowledge Institute, in addition to several run in-house for client organizations.
In a diverse career that began in Aotearoa New Zealand, Jane has worked in a wide range of evaluation, consulting, training, and quality assurance-related roles in education, government and business. She is now based in Auckland and provides evaluation consulting services, training and development and capacity building opportunities to organisations and evaluators in New Zealand and around the world.