Evaluators widely agree that stakeholder involvement is a central aspect of effective program evaluation. With the exception of articles on collaborative evaluation approaches, however, a systematic review of the breadth and depth of the literature on stakeholder involvement has not been published. In this study, we examine peer-reviewed empirical studies as the first step in establishing a firm foundation for a discussion of stakeholder involvement. We excluded all studies that did not provide descriptions of their methods, helping ensure that we only reviewed studies with strong methodological warrants for their findings. We address three key questions about the state of the empirical literature on stakeholder involvement, focusing on the studies' methodological and contextual characteristics, and the involvement themes and substantive nature (positive, negative/ mixed, or explanatory/normative
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.