Unraveling Theorists’ Evaluation Reality

The theorists in this volume have confronted the exercise presented to them in vastly different ways. As editors, we asked them “to consider how you would evaluate this program” and “to make and specify assumptions about the program context.” The primary task, however, was to describe “a course of action, which may have consequences that lead to other evaluation design decisions.” All of the theorists did indeed do this. There was great diversity in the evaluation approaches presented and, of course, in the presentation of approaches. As mentioned in Chapter Two, we anticipated diversity on both of these dimensions and were pleased to see that it emerged. Otherwise our experimental exercise would have been, dare we say, uninteresting. In this chapter, we explore the differences in approaches that are evident to us, as well as the similarities (which ought to be just as remarkable in some instances) on several dimensions of evaluation practice. We will comment first, however, on each theorist’s overall approach to the task before moving on to the discussion of comparing approaches, and have included a visual summary at the end of the chapter in Table 8.1.