Moral Evaluations

During an interview with a philosophy professor at BYU, he made the point that all evaluations by humans have elements of or are clearly filled with moral accountability issues. This theme resounded with my own feelings about my evaluations. These quotes illustrate-

I think it's very difficult to think of an issue of accountability that doesn't quickly become a moral issue.

I need to add some more over time.

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August 5, 2017 Introduction and Invitation

August 5, 2017 Beginning about 1997, I began documenting people's evaluation lives by interviewing them to ask what evaluation is to them and to give examples of them evaluating. In 2016 I published a book ( Volume #150 in the American Evaluation Association's New Directions for Evaluation series) about the evaluation lives of seven professional evaluators. Rather than publish their transcripts, they used our interview experience to create articles which are included in that volume. In 2018, a sequel was published about the evaluation lives of twenty-nine additional professional evaluators (Volume #157) that is available through Wiley. Here is a link to a pre-publication draft and here are the transcripts of my interviews with 24 of those evaluators (all those who gave permission to make them available to the public. However, my original interest was in understanding and sharing the evaluation lives of every day people (not just professional evaluators) in their perso...

Evaluators in IT

One of my major interests early on in my research into evaluators' lives was how different disciplines prepare their novitiates in doing evaluation within each discipline. Many of the interviews I'm linking to this blog come from people representing different disciplines and it would be interesting to search among them to see if there are patterns across representatives from similar disciplines. ogy field. I am linking some of their interviews to this post to facilitate looking for patterns across them (they are all available through the folders linked my first post in August): ST's (an experienced IT professional and now retired professor) interviews are here : MK's (an IT student) interviews are here : BL's (an experienced IT professor with years of professional experience) interviews are here :

Rationality and Evaluation

This article illustrates how important some evaluations can be and the fact that they are best made with a combination of rationality AND intuition, gut, feelings and other components that aren't always perceived as being rational. The role of rationality in evaluation came up in many of my interviews. The following quotes from an interview with Chauncey Riddle, a professor emeritus of philosophy at BYU illustrates some of the issues, which I summarize this way: Most people believe evaluations should be rational but in practice, they go with their feelings, hunches, the Spirit, their conscience, the Light of Christ and/or other inclinations that don't always appear to be rational. R: Well, I've learned that yes, that you can't evaluate without real help from the Spirit. But if you use your own judgment solely, you're very error-prone. DDW: Even if you're trying to be righteous and... R: Even if you're trying to do what's right. And the only ...

Evaluation Lives

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