Zeitschrift für Evaluation: Issue 2/2026, 25. Volume

In recent years, there has been a noticeable increase of impact measurements in the practice of social work. This trend is driven by organizations’ growing interest in insights regarding the outcomes and impacts of their own services, as well as by changes in their normative and institutional environment. This study uses Latent Class Analysis based on an online survey (n = 697) to investigate whether and how social work organizations in German-speaking Switzerland evaluate their services and which factors have an influence. Five types of evaluation practices were identified: 1) no evaluation activities, 2) fragmentary data collection, 3) evaluation activities with limited anchoring of evaluative structures, 4) formalized evaluation activities with obstacles to strategic alignment, and 5) strategically integrated evaluation activities. Aside from organizational size and sector, binding and non-binding internal as well as external guidelines, internal resources, goal definitions, and supportive leadership attitudes are significantly associated with evaluation practice, external resources are negatively related. The results illustrate the impact of internal organizational conditions for differentiated evaluation practices.

Keywords
outcome evaluation, outcome, evaluation capacity, evaluation, social work