Realist Evaluation: Practical Implications for Design and Methods

Gill’s biography:

Gill is Director of Community Matters Pty Ltd, a small consultancy based in South Australia which specialises in the conduct and design of evaluations of complex services and policies, and related training/professional development, for a range of service sectors (mainly in education, health, community services, crime prevention and justice-related).  After a career in managing public services in South Australia, Gill gained a PhD in social research methods that was supervised by Prof Nick Tilley (of ‘Pawson and Tilley, 1997’) and along with Ray Pawson, Trish Greenhalgh and Geoff Wong, she is also one of the co-investigators of the influential ESRC-funded RAMESES project - to review practice and establish standards for the conduct and reporting of realist reviews and meta-narrative reviews.  More recently, she has made significant contributions to the methodological debate about how realist methods can be used in conjunction with complexity theory.  Prior to becoming a full-time evaluator, consultant and trainer Gill mainly worked as a manager of service delivery programs for young people, but her pre-consultancy roles have also included: Executive Officer of the Youth Affairs Council of South Australia; Training Development Executive of the Youth Sector Training Council of South Australia; Director of Yarrow Place Rape and Sexual Assault Service, and Manager of Early Intervention in the Crime Prevention Unit of the South Australian Attorney-General’s Department.