Impartiality

Impartiality is an evaluation stance implying the lack of preference in the evaluator for the values or aims of any constituency or interest group in a program and expressing a formal disinterest in respect to outcomes. A position of impartiality involves the evaluator setting aside personal judgment to concentrate on feeding the judgments of participants. As Stenhouse put it, “instead of discriminating between alternative courses of action, [such an approach] seeks to make actors more discriminating.” This is a methodological principle, not an ontological claim. We may consider a difference between evaluators being impartial and being value free. Acknowledging the inevitability of evaluators' holding values in relation to program goals or activities, we may, nonetheless, conceive of an act of cognitive editing in which evaluators set aside their preferences to become procedurally disinterested in program decisions and directions. Impartiality also need not imply lack of engagement or personal commitment to evaluation participants. The refusal of evaluators to express a preference (i.e., expose their values) may inspire confidence in participants, promoting the expectation of equal treatment with others, unmitigated by evaluators' own beliefs. Nonetheless, some see this as [Page 195]optimistic, given the impossibility of suppressing evaluator subjectivity, and tantamount to seeking (an equally implausible) objectivity.