Suchergebnisse

AbstractAn advisory group constructed from within the community where a program evaluation is conducted can be an invaluable resource to an evaluator, particularly if the evaluator is an outsider and of a different culture. The author identifies useful roles that advisory groups have played in his organization's evaluations, and explores advisory group selection criteria, processes for identifying, vetting, and recruiting potential members who meet these criteria, and recruitment‐related pitfalls. Shortcomings of advisory groups in these contexts are discussed. The authors examine dos, don'ts, and lessons learned from working effectively with advisory groups in diverse cultural contexts; for example, understanding and appreciating unfamiliar styles of discourse and patterns of interaction and how to adapt to these. Differences in age, gender, position, social status, education, literacy, national origin, dialect, degree of assimilation, political affiliation, clan membership, knowledge of English, and comfort with European‐American manners and customs are all at play. ©Wiley Periodicals, Inc., and the American Evaluation Association.

Under what conditions may a social scientist legitimately pass judgment on the geopolitical climate of a region? The question is not easy to answer. First, it presupposes acknowledgement that there are value issues embedded in such judgments. Second, while a value-free attitude may indeed be attempted, such an attitude is difficult to achieve. All too frequently, evaluation of a region's "climate" is based on the values of the evaluator (and often without disclosure of this fact to unsuspecting readers).This is especially likely when the observer adopts a theoretical position, taking insufficient account of the tension between society and actors. Unfortunately, such theories give social scientists the false feeling that they have some sort of preferred cognitive vantage point. Theories which incorporate an "oversocialized conception of man" (Wrong, 196l) or, alternatively, an "overly psychological conception of society," ignore the fact that people act and make decisions about those actions, both of which are based upon value-judgments, and which do not have a one-to-one correlation with any given social situation.