Rethinking Evaluation Methodology

Medicine, engineering, and evaluation
have a highly significant common
feature: they completely ignored the ban
on evaluation that controlled the social
sciences through most of the last century.
What is it that doctors do in their core
practice? They diagnose disease and
malfunction, they recommend treatment,
they encourage good health. What do
engineers do? Amongst other tasks, they
work out why the bridge failed, why the
plane crashed, and how to correct the
underlying errors and build better
structures thereafter. And evaluators do
the same with programs or policies or
products or personnel—find the best,
improve the flawed, report on the worst.
It is the core nature of these essentially
practical enterprises to be evaluative; they
were not just describing or explaining or
predicting how the world is, but trying to
improve it. They simply didn’t take
seriously that the essential nature of
science had to be ‘value-free.’ Are there
any lessons to be learnt from the methods
used by our fellow-practitioners in these
highly evaluative disciplines?