Evaluation Lives

These excerpts from this interview with Russ Osguthorpe point out the view of evaluation as "finding out what is really going on" or the truth. Many evaluators I've interviewed see evaluation as a search for truth so they can then make decisions about actions they need to take or encourage clients to take that will deal with that truth authentically. R: I’ve told you this before, but in the mission field, your particular phrase or word or something was to find out what's really going on. Evaluators find out what's really going on. Not what people say is going on, but what's really happening and why it's happening. Those words in the mission field were invaluable to me, actually. And I told people quite regularly. And I actually tried to train my zone leaders and assistants. I said, I want you to find out what's really happening and why—what is motivating some of this behavior that is not productive or that is damaging to the mission. What's cau

Religious Freedom and Agency My son, Ryan, is a chaplain in the US Navy. He is also one of the professionals who are not professional evaluators I interviewed. I've shared , with his and his wife's permission, several interviews we had together about his views on evaluation and agency as a chaplain, as an Air Force band trombonist, and as a father, along with interviews I've done with his wife Nicki. Today he sent an email about religious freedom and I have posted below a couple of relevant links that summarize some of his and my assumptions and beliefs that guide our evaluation lives and the evaluation lives of many people I've interviewed. I think these assumptions are actually at the heart of most evaluators' belief systems whether or not they have articulated such or even thought about it explicitly. Probably, even if they are atheists and don't believe God gave them their freedom to use their agency to declare themselves such, I believe these are fundam

The following quotes are taken from interviews M held with B in 2014-15. Both M and B are LDS and they used that fact to explore several themes that I've seen in my interviews with LDS people about making evaluative decisions as individuals, in families, in church councils, in work settings, and more. The interviews themselves are available here . Many others are available in the first blog post in August 2017. B: In our marriage, the decision came from the basis that husband and wife are equal and therefore they should have equal say in the decisions.  It has never mattered that I'm the wage-earner in our home and that essentially 100% of our income comes from me.  It isn't my money and her money.  It is our money.  And therefore I have no more power in my voice than she does in terms of how we choose to spend the money, because we are equal.  And that's been the policy ever since the beginning because I think that's how God wants it to be.  At least I know i

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 :

I haven't been posting here since Sept 2017 but I've been busy transcribing interviews and linking them in the folders created in the first post in August 2017. Today I've been reviewing several interviews I conducted with my son Greg when he was in high school and then when he was an undergraduate and then a graduate student. On page 110 of the 136 pages of his transcripts, he gives and explains this formula he began developing as he was in a program evaluation class I was teaching at BYU. He does a good job of pulling together thoughts from across more than a decade about his own evaluation life and patterns he sees in others' lives. Here is the formula: Truth + Freedom + The Choice to Self-reflect = The Foundation for Effective Evaluation I invite you to read his analysis that goes into that formula and wrote your thoughts and comments on it if you have any by writing a comment to this post.  His document is here .

I've been reading everything I could find by Truman Madsen, my Philosophy 110 professor from 1971. As I've listened to his talks about insights from Joseph Smith I've realized that these fundamentals have driven much of my interest in the foundations for evaluation over the last 45+ years. But, unfortunately, I just discovered his Eternal Man (1966) book which summarizes these fundamentals and connects them to the philosophers I've tried to understand over this time in just 80 pages! I wish I had studied and assigned this book to all my evaluation students over the years. It would have helped me explain my views and why I think of evaluation as I do so much better than I was able to explain them myself. The brief review of the book by Chauncey Riddle from volume 8 (1968) of BYU Studies copied below and Chapter 1 of Madsen's book provide an outline of issues that give me the great hope that all people can be much better evaluators than most evaluation writers gi