A twenty‐year veteran's reflections on the Guiding Principles for Evaluators

Abstract

Comparing the American Evaluation Association Guiding Principles with other sets of evaluation standards, this chapter addresses reactions to the principles and concludes with recommendations for their use.

Influential Evaluations

“…by preventing ineffective policies or programs from being funded and implemented, as a later example will show. Beginning from the premise and growing recognition that evaluation as well as evaluation theories should be centered on social betterment (Covert, 1995;Lipsey, 2001;Mark, Henry, & Julnes, 2000;Smith, 2001), I will lay out a trichotomy of contributions that evaluations can make in the pursuit of social betterment and then supply some examples from the literature for each of them.…”