Editorial
| Author | Mathea Roorda,Keryn Hassall,Amy M Gullickson,Kelly M Hannum |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1035719X19894837 |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Editorial |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1035719X19894837
Evaluation Journal of Australasia
2019, Vol. 19(4) 159 –161
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1035719X19894837
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Editorial
Amy M Gullickson
Keryn Hassall
Kelly M Hannum
Mathea Roorda
‘Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are’.
José Ortega y Gasset
Values are deeply held beliefs about what is important and they shape every aspect of
the evaluation process. While values are at the heart of making evaluative judgements,
they are often implicit in the evaluation process. As Jane Davidson emphasised in her
2019 Australian Evaluation Society (AES) keynote, when evaluators do not explicitly
attend to values throughout the evaluation process, we accept the values implicit in the
chosen goals, objectives and validated measures. In doing so, we miss an aspect of
evaluation that is essential for generating accurate and useful information and pre-
venting misuse of findings.
The role of values has been debated in evaluation literature, but there is limited
explicit application of values theory or values-based approaches in mainstream evalu-
ation practice. While some evaluation approaches explicitly address values – such as
deliberative democratic evaluation (House & Howe, 1999), responsive evaluation
(Abma & Stake, 2001), culturally responsive evaluation (Hood et al., 2015), trans-
formative evaluation (Mertens, 2009) and values-engaged evaluation (Hall et al.,
2012) – these approaches do not seem to be widely used. So, what is preventing evalu-
ators from engaging on this aspect of evaluation practice?
We, the editors of this special issue, suspect that the reluctance of many evaluators to
engage with values in evaluation has a variety of sources, beginning with the history of
value-free, or fully objective, social science. For those with this perspective, evaluations
engaged with values are perceived as subjective judgements, rather than objective, and
therefore, biased and invalid. In addition to overcoming concerns about objectivity,
those who seek to centre evaluation on values face other challenges, for example:
894837EVJ0010.1177/1035719X19894837Evaluation Journal of AustralasiaGullickson et al.
editorial2019
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