Toni Watt, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Sociology at Texas State University, has been honored with the American Evaluation Association’s Alva and Gunnar Myrdal Government Award.
The Alva and Gunnar Myrdal Government Award is presented to an evaluator who exemplifies outstanding evaluation practice and who has made substantial cumulative contributions to the field of evaluation through the practice of evaluation and whose work is consistent with the AEA Guiding Principles for Evaluators.
Throughout her career, Watt has dedicated herself to evaluating programs and policies designed to improve outcomes for children and youth who have experienced trauma and/or the foster care system. She has extensive experience as a contracted program evaluator and initiated numerous policy studies to ensure that evaluation data is available to inform legislative decisions.
Watt is an advocate for participatory research, consistently engaging individuals with lived experience in the foster care system as research partners. Her scholarly work has been featured in academic journals, white papers, national and international media, and legislative testimony. In addition, Watt is committed to mentoring the next generation of evaluation researchers. She co-founded and co-directs the TXST Sociology Student Opportunities for Applied Research (SOAR) program, which provides undergraduate students with opportunities to conduct applied research.
The AEA is a professional association of evaluators devoted to the application and exploration of evaluation as a profession. The AEA prioritizes the advancement of evaluation best practices in multiple types of evaluation, including program evaluation, personnel evaluation, evaluation in education, evaluation in government, independent consulting and more. AEA has more than 5,000 members representing all 50 states in the United States as well as more than 80 foreign countries.