Personnel Evaluation

Personalizing evaluation is in the tradition of responsive and democratic evaluation. This process grew out of concerns about the distortions generated when we document a program as the principal or exclusive context within which to attribute significance to people's lives and work. It proposes, instead, the portrayal of people's lives and work as contexts within which to read the significance of a program—in pursuit of certain ameliorating effects. First, as well as holding people to account for the realization of program or policy aims, we can hold programs and policies to account for their capacity to respond to participants' aspirations and actions. Second, by contextualizing a program in a life or an event, we can better measure its significance independent of its political meaning. Personalizing evaluation also means legitimating the person of the evaluator as a bearer of values. Although stopping short of approval for advocacy, and recommending that evaluators remain impartial and disinterested in outcomes, personalized evaluation promotes the view that evaluators must be their own methodologists and seek personal voice and personal meaning in their evaluations.