With a Splash of Soda, Please: Towards Active Engagement with Difference

In the previous critique, Saville Kushner has offered a very thoughtful and provocative commentary on our statement about the merits of mixed-method approaches to contemporary program and policy evaluation, published in Volume 7, Issue 1 of Evaluation. I am very honored that Saville took our work seriously enough to read it as carefully as he did. I am also pleased that his commentary so richly invites further conversation. This response is offered in the spirit of continuing conversation. My response has three main parts. First, I agree with most of what Kushner said in his commentary, and I would like to underscore several of the critical strands of the evaluation ideology that I believe we indeed mostly share. Second, despite our common evaluation perspectives and allegiances, Kushner seems to disagree with me and my co-authors about the merits of mixing methods or of adopting a mixed-method approach to evaluation. Kushner offers compelling reasons not to mix, as well as cautions about both the politics and conceptual rationales for mixing. Resisting the temptation to respond to each of Kushner’s elegantly argued points, I will focus on two key themes of disagreement, as I understand them. And finally, I will briefly re-state my own position, re-framing it with the particular discourse of this conversation.