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

项目评估在国际发展领域内外都是一个新兴的专业。这一领域在过去三年中增加的成员比过去三十年增加的还要多，这反映出组织决策的制定方式和合理性发生了更广泛的变化。评估人员负责对项目的影响和价值做出公正的描述，他们必须协调国际发展的不同理念，以及证据和证明。然而，到目前为止，评估作为一种职业还很少被研究。该项目将研究评估人员如何塑造发展政策和实践。该项目的结果将对需要对其赠款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有用。该项目采用定性方法来阐明影响评估人员实地实践的过程，以及他们工作的更广泛后果。该项目将在从地区到国际的各种专业评估协会的年会期间及其前后，对70名工作评估人员进行会议人种学和深入的定性访谈。这个实地考察将揭示这个相对孤立的行业的成员如何创造和挑战管理他们不断发展的领域的规范。作为一个新兴的专业团体，对评估者的分析结果为评估者在进行项目评估时如何与其他利益相关者接触的更大研究提供了重要的制度背景。这种对专业评估人员的多层次分析将为发展领域的政策和实践提供信息，并为更广泛的评估提供信息。这项研究为科学社会学做出了贡献，它通过测量、说服和专业化的日常过程来追踪社会变化是如何发生的。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识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.