Guba and Lincoln (as well as Fetterman, 1994) advise getting stakeholders together early to
inventory potential program meanings and success inclicatom in the spring of 1997, members of the
evaluation team began to meet with program staff to gather Preliminary information. Because of the
late start of the evaluation, the group was not able to bring other stakeholders to the table. However,
program staff did contact various categories of clients and collaborators and asked them to submit
evaluation topics to the group. From these the evaluation team developed semistructured qualitative
protocols.