A Note on David Fetterman’s Response

Let’s cut to the chase. I claim that the revised version of empowerment evaluation (EE) put forward in this book fails to meet the key minimum standards for formative, summative, or any other defensible purpose of evaluation, namely the standards of validity, credibility, and ethicality (the other reasonable requirements of utility and cost effectiveness require these). These are not my standards; they are the standards of science, scholarship, practical life, and morality. David argues that this line of criticism is inappropriate because all he was trying to do was suggest improvements to EE, and it is only appropriate for reviewers to focus on those as the primary goal of this book. But evaluators are obliged to review the improved version of whatever they evaluate, not just the improvements to it, simply because the most important question for the reader or user is whether the effort to improve led to something worthwhile. It didn’t, because these improvements ignore the basic flaws. Of course, self-evaluation sometimes leads to good insights; of course, it’s a good cause to teach staff how to evaluate their program (so EE is an acceptable first step in a three-step staff development program—where Step 2 is how to compensate for the limitations of self-evaluation, and Step 3 is lots more practice); of course, the critical friend can help amateurs avoid some errors; of course, hundreds of users in dozens of countries use and like friendly evaluation approaches such as EE, but the bottom line is still that amateurish self-evaluation, which the only professional around won’t even co-sign, is an absurd model for serious evaluation

Credibility · Criticism · Engineering ethics · Formative assessment · Pedagogy · Political science · Program evaluation · Public relations · Scholarship · Summative assessment · Computer Science · Engineering · Evaluation and Performance Assessment · Law · Psychology

• Empowerment Evaluation as Evaluation Ideology

  Open Access•Nick L Smith•American Journal of Evaluation•2007

  Add to list