Logic of Evaluation

The Definition of Evaluation

Synthesizing the dictionary definitions of evaluation and an evaluation yields this: “determining the merit, worth, or significance of things; a report of such a determination.” There is no need to deviate from the common meaning, and it avoids confusion in other people's minds to stay with it. Objections are often raised that such a definition excludes certain approaches to evaluation, such as utilization-focused evaluation, but of course it does not: They are simply approaches to this task, and the definition is strictly neutral about what approaches are best. Evaluators often feel that it would be more appropriate to define evaluation as what evaluators do, but that is a mistake. Evaluators do many things, such as conduct surveys and interviews and statistical analyses and, no doubt, going to church and watching television. The issue of definition requires us to focus on what they do that distinguishes them as evaluators, and the answer is just exactly their concern with determining value (i.e., merit, worth, or significance, depending on the context). Of course, evaluators do many other things that are not intrinsically evaluative, both on the way to an evaluative conclusion and in the course of business dealings that request these other services, for which many evaluators are extremely well qualified. If these other things were all that they did, an evaluator would be only a social scientist—a perfectly respectable, but somewhat limited profession. It is taking the extra step, from empirical or merely factual research to an evaluative conclusion that marks the evaluator as a practitioner working, at least partly, in a different discipline. That is the answer to the important question [Page 236]about the difference between evaluation and the usual kind of research in the social sciences. Someone once said that the usual kind of empirical research is an attempt to answer the question, “What's so?” whereas the evaluator tries to answer the question, “So what?” One might add that the social scientist is often also concerned to find out “Why so?” and the policy analyst is often concerned with the question, “Now what?” Of course, for almost all of the history of the social sciences, social scientists' answer to the question “So what?” was simply that there could not be any scientific answer to it or, indeed, any rational answer. Evaluative questions were beyond the domain of science and reason, a mere matter of preference or taste. If that were true, there could be no legitimate field of evaluation.

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