| Contact Details |
 |
Associate Professor Yoland Wadsworth |
| Biography |
Associate Professor Yoland Wadsworth is an Honorary Principal Fellow with the McCaughey Centre, VicHealth Centre for the Promotion of Mental Health and Community Wellbeing.
Yoland has been a social research and evaluation practice-based theorist, facilitator and consultant in health, human and community services for 36 years. A research sociologist, Yoland Wadsworth has helped pioneer in Australia the development and use of field-based research and evaluation approaches with communities, groups and complex organisational settings. She is experienced in integrated implementation research design and the use of emergent and collaborative inquiry strategies for use by human services’ staff, consumers and other stakeholders. She developed the concept of the critical reference group, a generic term to refer to ‘those who the research and evaluation is intended primarily to benefit’. Yoland is particularly known for her participatory action research and complex ‘whole systems’ research & evaluation projects with government, NGOs, large institutions and community health, education and human services. A ten-year engagement in early childhood services in the 1970s and a ten-year sequence of consumer-staff collaborative researches in acute mental health service in the 1980s-1990s have been defining landmarks in a long career working with many thousands of individuals and agencies, including through numerous teaching-learning workshops. She is currently an appointed member of the Ross House Committee and manages the Action Research Centre at the Augustine Centre in association with the Borderlands oases Graduate School of Community Research.
Yoland has an international reputation for quality innovative theory in research methodology, publishing, consultancy & collaborative inquiry facilitation, and is the author of Australia's best-selling research and evaluation methods books (now more than 50,000 copies) of Do It Yourself Social Research and Everyday Evaluation on the Run (2e, Allen & Unwin 1997). She is currently completing the third book in this trilogy – Building it in: Research and evaluation for [truly] living human systems. She has a continuing working interest in the Australasian Evaluation Society’s National Policy & Systems award-winning project in integrated health promotion: NEAR (Narrative Evaluation Action Research) for the Department of Human Services. Yoland is additionally an Adjunct Professor with the Centre for Applied Social Research at RMIT University, Melbourne.