Remarks made at the Environmental Evaluators’ Network Forum: NAVIGATING EVALUATIVE COMPLEXITY IN THE AGE OF OBAMA
The author draws on her vast evaluation experience, especially in federal evaluation, to confront issues of complexity in evaluation. She offers the idea of using comprehensive checklists, and supplies her own example.
An exerpt:
"My subject this morning is the problem of tackling complexity in evaluation, of trying to find some magic thread, like the one Ariadne gave Theseus, to get us through this Minotaur’s maze of surrounding issues that it seems we have to confront. Now, these issues -- like the history of a cultural, social, economic or environmental problem, or the politics and policies of a particular period, or the battling theories of an intellectual climate, or the spillover of a subject area into bordering fields – these issues are complex, but they’re hardly new. In fact, they’ve been with us since the first agricultural evaluations, but the truth is, we haven’t paid a lot of attention to them. Perhaps we just didn’t see their relevance to our work; perhaps we were a little bit mesmerized by those methodological tunnels we love to dig; or perhaps we simply hadn’t grasped the power of these issues to affect our credibility."
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| Author | Eleanor Chelimsky |
| Publisher | N/A |
| Publication Date | June 8, 2010 |
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| Submitted to Point K | June 30, 2010 - 11:57am |
