Mertens, Donna M.

(b. 1951, Spokane, Washington). Ph.D., M.S. Educational Psychology, University of Kentucky; B.A. Psychology, Thomas More College.

Mertens is Professor in the Department of Educational Foundations and Research at Gallaudet University. Her theoretical contribution to evaluation has centered on bringing the implications of the transformative paradigm to the evaluation community. The transformative paradigm places central importance on the lives and experiences of those who suffer oppression and discrimination, whatever the basis of that may be—sex, race or ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status. Evaluators working within this paradigm are consciously aware of power differentials in the evaluation context, and they search for ways to ameliorate the effects of oppression and discrimination by linking their research activities to social action and wider questions of social inequity and social justice.

Many people contributed to broadening Merten's understanding of effective evaluation. Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba influenced her thinking about the importance of philosophical assumptions and paradigms in guiding evaluation practice. Patti Lather shaped the directions of her theorizing about the emancipatory paradigm and the potential contribution of feminist thinking in evaluation. Carole Truman, John Stanfield, Ricardo Millett, Rodney Hopson, and Carol Gill illuminated the intersections of race and ethnicity, gender, disability, and sexual orientation. Elizabeth Whitmore and Amy Wilson stretched her understandings of the transformative paradigm in international development work. Amy Szarkowski and Carolyn Williamson, two of Merten's Ph.D. students at Gallaudet University, brought the optimistic perspective to her theory of a transformative paradigm in the form of positive psychology and resilience theory, which they used as the theoretical bases for their dissertations. Michael Patton's emphasis on utilization of evaluation and the personal factor has influenced her thinking as well.

Mertens has served as a member of the American Evaluation Association's Board of Directors, as President in 1998 and as a board member. During that time, she addressed two major initiatives, one of which was the Building Diversity Initiative, a project funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation to increase [Page 248]the number of evaluators of color, as well as to improve the evaluation skills of all evaluators working in culturally diverse communities. She also served as the board liaison to the planning group that resulted in the founding of the International Organization for Cooperation in Evaluation. She has conducted many different evaluations, ranging from a national evaluation of court accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing people to the transformation of the nation's teacher preparation programs for teachers of the deaf to the effects of international development efforts for people who are deaf, blind, and mentally retarded in Egypt, Costa Rica, and Mexico.

She has authored, coauthored, edited, and coedited several books, including Parents and Their Deaf Children: The Early Years (with Kay Meadow Orlans and Marilyn Sass Lehrer), Research and Inequality (with Carole Truman and Beth Humphries as coeditors), Research Methods in Education and Psychology: Integrating Diversity; and Research Methods in Special Education (with John McLaughlin), as well as journal articles published in the American Journal of Evaluation, American Annals of the Deaf, and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

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