Whitmore, Elizabeth

(b. 1939, Newton, Massachusetts). Ph.D, Cornell University; M.S.W., B.A., Boston University.

There have been two main influences in Whitmore's life as an evaluator. One has been her background in social work, both as a practitioner and as an educator. This has pushed her to continually focus on connecting practice and theory and to deepen her understanding of the effects of contextual factors on people's daily lives. It has helped her take the larger (social, political, cultural, economic) context into account when conducting evaluations. Her social work training has also reinforced the practical aspects of theory, the “So what does all this mean in terms of practice?” aspect.

The primary influence for Whitmore was her introduction to participatory action research, which she encountered in the early 1980s when she visited the Highlander Research and Education Center (in New Market, Tennessee). From her experiences at Highlander, Whitmore carried away ideas about people being the experts in their own lives and the democratization of knowledge creation and incorporated them into her own evaluation practices. At Cornell University, she was taught a variety of evaluation models, the vast majority being quantitative and based in fairly conventional social science theory. At that time, the stakeholder model was brand new and was seen as an exciting innovation in the field. Whitmore, being J. Greene's first graduate student at Cornell, claims that Greene's “mentoring was (and is) tremendously valuable for me. Our discussions about the role of empowerment in evaluation and the complexities of actually practicing participatory evaluation played a crucial role in helping me to clarify my thinking.” It seemed quite natural to apply her learning from Highlander to ideas of stakeholder evaluation. Her contributions in this area helped to create and advance the field of participatory evaluation.

She is Editor of the Participatory Evaluation issue of New Directions in Evaluation (Vol. 80, Winter 1998). Over the years, she has conducted a number of evaluations using participatory evaluation. She has also been active in discussions of feminism in evaluation and was one of those involved in initiating the Feminist TIG at AEA.