Doctoral Dissertation Research: Doing Evaluation: Knowledge Production in International Development

项目评估是在国际发展领域内外兴起的一种职业。该领域在过去三年中增加的成员比过去三十年增加的成员更多，反映出组织决策的制定方式和合理性发生了更大的变化。评估员负责对项目影响和价值进行公正的描述，他们必须协调国际发展以及证据和证据的不同理想。然而，到目前为止，评估作为一种职业的研究很少。本项目将研究评价者如何制定发展政策和实践。该项目的成果将有助于需要在赠款中进行评价的政府和私人供资机构、委托对其工作进行评价的执行组织，以及进一步确定其专业标准和做法的评价人员本身。该项目采用定性方法，阐明影响评估员实地实践的过程，以及他们工作的更广泛结果。该项目将在从区域到国际的各种专业评价协会的年度会议上和周围对70名工作评价人员进行会议民族志研究和深入的定性访谈。这项实地调查将揭示这一相对孤立的职业的成员如何创造和挑战管理他们不断增长的领域的规范。由此产生的对评价人员作为新兴专业群体的分析，为评价人员在进行项目评价时如何与其他利益攸关方接触这一更大的研究提供了重要的体制背景。对专业评估员的这种多层次分析将为发展领域的政策和实践以及更广泛的评价提供信息。这项研究为科学社会学做出了贡献，该研究追溯了社会变化是如何通过日常测量、说服和专业化过程发生的。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Project evaluation is a profession on the rise within and beyond the field of international development. The field has added more members in the last three years than in the previous thirty, reflecting wider shifts in how organizational decisions are made and justified. Charged with producing impartial accounts of project impact and worth, evaluators must reconcile different ideals of international development, and of evidence and proof. And yet evaluation as a profession has been little studied to date. This project will study of how evaluators shape development policy and practice. Results from the project will be useful for government and private funding agencies that require evaluations in their grants, the implementing organizations that commission evaluations of their work, and evaluators themselves as they further define their professional standards and practices. The project employs qualitative methods to shed light on the processes that shape evaluators' practice on the ground, and the wider consequences of their work. The project will conduct meeting ethnography and in-depth qualitative interviews with 70 working evaluators at and around the annual meetings of diverse professional evaluation associations, ranging from the regional to the international. This fieldwork will reveal how members of this relatively solitary profession create and contest the norms governing their growing field. The resulting analysis of evaluators as an emerging professional community gives vital institutional context to the larger study of how evaluators engage with other stakeholders as they carry out project evaluations. This multi-level analysis of professional evaluators will inform policy and practice in the development field, and for evaluation more broadly. The study contributes to a sociology of science that traces how social change happens through everyday processes of measurement, persuasion, and professionalization.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.