Evaluation of Service Provision to Rural Community Groups: Is There a Service Delivery Problem and How Do We Research It?

The central thesis of this paper is that established criteria for evaluating rural services are not available and probably will never be established on a comprehensive basis. It is argued that adequacy of services is normative in nature and, therefore, service evaluation necessitates primary investigation on the local and regional level. Several alternative research designs and scale construction are discussed relative to rural service evaluation with primary emphasis placed upon quasi-experimental design. It is concluded that a closer association between research and development decision-making and implementation is essential to increase the probability of relevance of developmental programs on the local level