Naturalistic Evaluation

Naturalistic evaluation combines the assumptions and methods of naturalistic inquiry with various approaches that attempt to blend evaluation into the cultures and lives of the people involved. The term naturalistic has both paradigmatic (basic beliefs and assumptions) and methodological (procedural and practical) meanings. In recent years, other labels, such as constructivist and interpretivist, have been used to emphasize various dimensions of the naturalistic paradigm, but the methods have continued to be mostly, though not exclusively, qualitative. Schwandt, in his Dictionary of Qualitative Inquiry, notes that these terms also suggest the study of human life with the assumption that “meaning of human action is inherent in that action, and that the task of the inquirer is to unearth that meaning.” The main objective is to use those meanings to judge the merit or worth of an evaluand in ways natural to the setting, expectations, values, assumptions, and dispositions of the participants, with minimal modification due to the inquiry processes used and assumptions held by the evaluator.

The argument for naturalistic evaluation makes the assumption that if evaluators are sensitive to the cultures, assumptions, and ways of the people, they are helping with the evaluation process, and results will emerge naturally through the human interactions evaluators have with the people they are serving. Further, naturalistic evaluators believe that the people they serve will be more forthright and able to share their values and perspectives and thus will be more likely to use the results if evaluations emerge naturally from the questions, ways of knowing, and values of those people.

Ironically, naturalistic evaluation is based philosophically on antinaturalism. Naturalism is a philosophy that equates the aims and methods of the social and human sciences with those of the natural sciences—prediction and control through the discovery of physical law explanations of matter in motion, including human behavior. Antinaturalists reject this view of science and the efforts to achieve physical law explanations of human action. They argue instead that, unlike objects in nature, human phenomena are best known through understanding of the meanings inherent in their experiences and actions. Therefore, antinaturalists seek to understand human action by exploring the meaningful ways in which people experience their world. Thus, to the philosopher, naturalistic evaluation is actually antinaturalistic in its assumptions. However, psychologists, sociologists, and others have used the terms naturalistic, constructivist, and interpretivist to represent this antinaturalist view of inquiry into human action and meaning.

The naturalistic inquiry paradigm and associated methods grew out of a long tradition in several fields of human inquiry, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, the humanities, and other disciplines. [Page 272]Willems and Rausch defined naturalistic inquiry as “the investigation of phenomena within and in relation to their naturally occurring contexts.” They emphasized that there are degrees of naturalness that depend on how much the investigator influences or manipulates “the antecedent conditions of the behavior studied” and “the degree to which units are imposed by the investigator upon the behavior studied.” Denzin claimed that the logic of naturalistic inquiry encourages the inquirer to resist using methods that oversimplify the complexity of everyday life.

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