Date: Friday, February 20, 2026
I’m Lisle Hites, former Chair of the Needs Assessment TIG and Professor of Community Medicine and Population Health at the University of Alabama.
Today’s post emphasizes why you should mix your methods and be careful not to assume you already know what the needs are you’ve set out to measure. When we know, or think we know, what the potential needs are that we seek to measure, the best, most evaluators will choose to develop a quantitative needs assessment instrument to cleanly determine needs with precision finality. The problem is, we often fall victim to the old “what you see is all there is” adage.
A hospital employes 300 nurses and has concerns about poor morale, dissatisfaction, and signs of burnout in their nursing staff. This has resulted in a high turnover rate, with nurses quitting 30% more frequently than the national and regional average. Time for an organizational needs assessment (or perhaps well past time, but better late than never). Key factors impacting job dissatisfaction, based on discussions during performance reviews and exit interviews (neither of which are anonymous), point to stressful working conditions that include long work hours, high patient load, more work duties than can be fully executed, and vague concerns about feeling unappreciated and/or trusted to do their job properly. Hospital management, recognizing the resulting impact on patient care and financial impact of the hiring process and reduced capacity resulting from understaffing, desperately want to intervene.
If they choose to go with a quantitative needs assessment to help determine their best course of action, factors to be assessed will include workload, work duration, training needs, etc. What is not known, but is often assumed, is that these factors are the causes of their problems. However, they could also be symptoms of other causes of organizational dysfunction. If, however, the evaluation team balances the quantitative items with qualitative questions, utilizing a mixed-methods approach, they may learn that the dysfunction driving low job-satisfaction and high turnover rates is not actually the amount or difficulty of the work, but rather the dysfunction lies with management and how they treat the nursing staff.
As evaluators we seek out the truth for accurate conclusions. The example may seem straight forward and the most senior management may be supportive in acting on problems found, however the middle management who likely are interacting with the needs assessment team will likely not be happy to hear that they are the problem. Accordingly, if you suspect that the problem lies with the management, it is even more important that you include anonymous qualitative opportunities when you capture needs.
It’s unlikely you’ll be green lighted to ask “to what extent is your job stress directly related to your managers leadership style” but this sentiment can be shared as comments in open-ended responses, which you are duty bound to pass on to senior leadership in the course of your reporting.
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Needs Assessment (NA) TIG Week with our colleagues in the NA AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our NA TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on theaea365 webpageso that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by theAmerican Evaluation Associationand provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.