Program evaluation in the public interest: A new research methodology

Abstract

For every social welfare or social control service program there are several parties, each with different interests: patients, clients, staff, management, and sponsors. Evaluation of such a program in the public interest must take the interests of each of these parties into account. To do so requires an untraditional methodology, that of a second-person, or communal, science, which is not above the conflict of parties and their interests in specifying the variables, staffing the research, balancing considerations of intrusion against those of bias, considering the action implications of the data, sequentially staging the research, or even publishing findings. This all makes evaluation in the public interest a highly political process often unlikely to be logically decisive about intervariable relationships, to yield generalizable results, or even to be completed.