What women want: a critical appraisal of approaches to evaluating voluntary sector women's services

Wong, Kevin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3847-2316, Kinsella, Rachel, O' Keeffe, Caroline and Meadows, Linda (2025) What women want: a critical appraisal of approaches to evaluating voluntary sector women's services. Prison Service Journal (277). pp. 41-47. ISSN 0300-3558

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Abstract

This article is the product of a collective approach, rooted in decades of evaluation and research experience, seeking evidence of impact of services for justice-involved women. In conducting evaluations, we have been constrained, to some extent, by the research commissioners seeking evidence that meets their needs, i.e. validation of public policy and justification for public investment. We believe this to be a product of what has been coined as the doctrine of new public management (NPM) which has dominated UK public service since the 1980s and applies corporate performance management frameworks and resource allocation methods to public services. In the context of voluntary sector specialist women’s services, this results in an over-fixation with reducing reoffending as the end goal and the use of randomised control trials as the ‘holy-grail’ of evaluation. We argue that, freed from the shackles of such approaches, it is possible to realise greater benefits for all – commissioners, service providers and, importantly, justice-involved women – through more nuanced evidence gathering. To this end, we argue for applying a scientific realist approach to evaluating women’s services, one which starts with: ‘what works, for whom, in what circumstances?’. We show that it is only by acknowledging the complexity and changeability of social programme implementation and delivery – the interplay between delivery mechanisms, context and outcomes – and recognising the value of co-production and peer research that we can hope to arrive at an approach to evaluation that actually assists in service improvement and adaptation.