Lincoln, Yvonna S.

(b. 1944, Tampa, Florida). Ed.D. Higher Education, Indiana University–Bloomington; M.A. Medieval History, University of Illinois–Urbana; B.A. History, Michigan State University.

Lincoln is Ruth Harrington Chair of Educational Leadership and Distinguished University Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Administration and Human Resource Development at Texas A&M University. She has held faculty positions at Vanderbilt University, the University of Kansas, Indiana University, and Stephens College.

She is most widely known for the creation of a new paradigm in evaluation theory, with Egon Guba, based on her understanding of the inability of the “scientific method” to answer evaluation questions satisfactorily or with appropriate responsiveness to those most affected by evaluation's findings. She has published numerous journal articles. Her special interests are program review processes in higher education, organizational analysis, and alternative paradigm research. She is the coauthor, with Egon Guba, of Effective Evaluation, Naturalistic Inquiry, and Fourth Generation Evaluation, and she is Editor of Organizational Theory and Inquiry: The Paradigm Revolution. She is also Coeditor (with Norman Denzin) of two editions of the Handbook of Qualitative Research.

Her work has been strongly influenced by her education in history, which has given her an awareness of how constructed history is, how incomplete the resources are on which we lean to create history for ourselves, and on how much interpretation of evidence—in the absence of complete context—takes place, even when our sources appear thorough and rich. In evaluation, she has been much influenced by Robert Stake and his work on responsive evaluation, especially his focus on the democratic and social justice aspects of stakeholder responsiveness. She was also greatly influenced by Parlett and Hamilton, Lawrence Stenhouse, and others working to create widespread involvement in evaluation decision making.

With Egon Guba, she is the recipient of the American Evaluation Association 1987 Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for Outstanding Contributions to Research and Scholarship in Evaluation Theory. She is also the recipient of the 1990 Distinguished Researcher Award, Division J, American Educational Research Association; the 1991 Sidney Suslow Distinguished Research Award, Association for Institutional Research; the 1993 Research Achievement Award, Association for the Study of Higher Education; and the 2002 Indiana University College of Education Distinguished Alumna Award. She has served as President of the American Evaluation Association and on the executive boards of the Association for the Study of Higher Education and of Division J (Postsecondary Education) of the American Educational Research Association.