Responsive Evaluation

Relevance

When responsive evaluation was introduced by Stake, it was characterized by the fact that it takes the concerns and issues of stakeholders as criteria for evaluation. Stake claimed that an evaluation is responsive if it orients more to program activities than program intents; if it responds to audience requirements for information; and if the different value perspectives held by stakeholders are referred to in reporting program success and failure.

Stake’s initial ideas helped accelerate a transformation of the evaluation enterprise into its current pluralistic character. Because of their widespread appeal and continuing importance, these ideas have also permeated many varied strands of evaluation theory and practice. Responsive evaluation is considered relevant, because

• postmodern society has become more pluralistic, and so evaluation approaches that deal with this plurality of values and interests are needed;
• [Page 1427]people are less inclined to accept the wisdom of experts, and so evaluation approaches that legitimize and incorporate the ordinary wisdom, voices, and understandings of multiple stakeholders are needed to improve practice; and
• the quality and meaning of programs cannot be understood and reduced to a set of simple indicators—an insistence on complexity and representations of multiple realities and contexts is needed.

All of these needs are addressed in responsive evaluation.

Original Ideas

With the public address titled “Program Evaluation, Particularly Responsive Evaluation” given during a sabbatical in Sweden in 1973, Stake offered a new vision of and rationale for educational and social program evaluation to the then fledgling evaluation communities. In this vision, evaluation was reframed—from the application of sophisticated analytic techniques to address distant policy makers’ questions of program benefits and effectiveness “on the average,” to an engagement with on-site practitioners and stakeholders about the quality and meanings of their practice.

As subsequently elaborated by Stake and others, responsive evaluation proposed a new kind of evaluation knowledge and a new way of conceiving the evaluator role. Evaluation knowledge was no longer to be thought of solely in terms of causal, propositional knowledge but to include the socially constructed meaning and worth of programs in their context. This implied a shift from a postpositivist to a hermeneutic and constructivist approach to research. Over the years, Stake has argued for a holistic understanding of a program from the perspectives of those engaged in it, thus lending depth and richness to understanding the success or failure of programs. Scholars promoted naturalistic inquiry and qualitative research methods as most appropriate to gain insight into participants’ insider perspectives, program uniqueness, and context. Moreover, these scholars argued for ways of reporting evaluation that appeal to and connect with the ordinary ways in which participants and stakeholders make sense of the world.

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