From indicators to face validity to theory – and back again

Abstract

Since 2010, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has advanced creative placemaking throughout the United States not only by funding individual projects, but also by providing resources in support of research and evaluation. This chapter reflects on the NEA’s journey in promoting metrics and publicly-accessible data sources for assessing practitioners’ progress toward achieving livability outcomes—a journey that has led to a theory of change, a logic model, and a measurement model for Our Town, the NEA’s premier creative placemaking program. These experiences have reinforced the NEA’s commitment to understanding and articulating the relationship between Our Town program components and the intended and unintended outcomes reported by grantees and their organizational partners. The next phase of this institutional learning process will occur through a mixed-methods evaluation study that will attempt to validate the conceptual framework and metrics that the NEA has developed. Along the way, NEA researchers have grown to appreciate the complexity of concepts and variables at work in empirical studies of creative placemaking. Similarly, NEA researchers have benefited from parallel efforts in the field to identify outcomes and indicators that resonate with policy-makers and practitioners.