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

项目评价是一个在国际发展领域内外都在兴起的职业。在过去的三年里，该领域增加了比前三十年更多的成员，反映了组织决策的制定和合理性的更广泛变化。负责对项目的影响和价值进行公正的评估，评估人员必须调和国际发展的不同理想以及证据和证明。 然而，迄今为止，评价作为一种职业很少被研究。本项目将研究评价人员如何影响发展政策和做法。 该项目的结果将有助于政府和私人供资机构在其赠款中要求评价，执行组织委托评价他们的工作，评价人员本身，因为他们进一步确定自己的专业标准和做法。该项目采用定性方法，阐明影响评价人员实地做法的过程及其工作的更广泛后果。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会议前后对70名工作评价人员进行会议人种学和深入的定性访谈。这项实地考察将揭示这个相对孤立的职业的成员如何创造和竞争管理他们不断增长的领域的规范。 由此对评价人员作为一个新兴的专业群体所作的分析，为更广泛地研究评价人员在进行项目评价时如何与其他利益攸关方互动提供了重要的体制背景。这种对专业评价人员的多层次分析将为发展领域的政策和做法以及更广泛的评价提供信息。该研究有助于科学社会学，追踪社会变革是如何通过日常的测量，说服和专业化过程发生的。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值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.