The Myth of Value-free Evaluation

To some people, the social sciences should be value free. And of all the methods in the social sciences that ought to be value free, evaluation should be most of all. After all, it is the final gatekeeper that clears applications of social science knowledge for practical use as policy. But those who have thought seriously about science realize scientists must make many choices. Not all such choices are automatically and completely determined by the logic of the steps of the "scientific method." They involve judgment, judgments such as what is important and what is not, what shall be studied, what shall be observed, what corrected or controlled for, what result is of practical significance and to whom? All these judgments involve the weighing of various factors and deciding what is best in the situation to attain some kind of worthy goal. It is worth noting, that it is in the act of making these judgments that evaluators demonstrate their professionalism and their skill. These judgments define the unique characteristics of one evaluator in contrast to another; each evaluation position is demarked from others by the way it handles the value questions poised in this section. In one sense, it is these questions augmented to form a completely descriptive set, which would come closest to uniquely defining the act of evaluation. But the point to be made here is that values are involved in the social sciences and, thus, we must ask not "whether" but "how" they are involved in evaluation.