Julnes, George

(b. 1954, Cincinnati, Ohio). Ph.D. Psychology-Clinical/Community, University of Hawaii—Manoa; M.B.A., M.P.P. Public Policy, University of Michigan; B.S. Psychology and Philosophy, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Julnes is Associate Professor in the Research and Evaluation Methodology Program in the Department of Psychology at Utah State University. Previously he was on the faculty at Fairleigh Dickinson and Old Dominion Universities.

Julnes has contributed to the field of evaluation primarily through his development of a pragmatic approach to evaluation, created by combining the neo-Vygotskian notion of “assisted performance”; Weick's ideas on sense making; the realist foundations of many evaluation theorists; and the value theory of the pragmatists, wherein we arrive at judgments of value first and only afterwards divine the balance of the abstract principles responsible for those judgments. This unique approach reconciles many of the previously accepted qualitative versus quantitative debates. Incorporating insights from his collaborations with Melvin M. Mark and Gary Henry, Julnes' work emphasizes the role of social programs in supporting available individual and social capacities and the role of evaluation in supporting the natural decision-making capacities of stakeholders.

Julnes was taught and influenced by Larry Mohr, particularly in regard to his outcome line approach to program theory and his multiple regression framework for evaluation analysis; by Roland Tharp, in regard to his vision of community psychology and the neo-Vygotskian developmental concepts, such as “assisted performance”; and by Karl Weick, in regard to his constructivist “sense-making” view of what people do naturally in organizations and other social settings. Julnes' intellectual influences are the early pragmatists, such as John Dewey and Oliver Wendell Holmes; the neorealist philosophers Hilary Putnam, Richard Boyd, Roy Bhaskar, and Rom Harré, who have articulated alternatives to the traditional empiricist-constructivist debates; and the work of Don Campbell and Lee Cronbach.