Title:	Functions, Methods and Concepts in Evaluation Research
Authors:	Reinhard Stockmann Wolfgang Meyer Gareth Bartley
Keywords:	Functions, Methods
Issue Date:	2013
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Description:	This book is an introduction to evaluation, which has been the subject of a tremendous boom in recent years. While evaluation has been established as a profession in the USA for more than 40 years, it has only been possible to recognize a similar tendency in Europe since the beginning of the 1990s. Since the PISA evaluation at the latest, the term has become part of German vocabulary. It now occupies a regular place even in everyday usage. In a series of articles entitled ‘How the world loves’ 1 in Stern magazine, for example, it was asserted that ‘ ... women tend to evaluate more and more precisely who they are getting involved with’ ( Stern 32/2007: 102). The use of this term is not only spreading in a positively inflationary manner; it now also appears in many contexts in which – at least from the point of view of its scientific meaning – it actually has no place at all, for not every form of assessment is necessarily also an evaluation. Whilst some terms – such as social group, competence, qualification, institution, system – were consciously transposed from everyday usage into the language of science, subsequently having to be cleansed there of their everyday connotations and precisely defined in a scientific sense, the term evaluation has gone the other way. Being used in its everyday application to refer to just about anything at all, the term is rapidly losing its scientific precision, so that it is now time for it to be redefined more clearly. This applies not only to the term itself, but also to the concepts originally denoted by it, which had by virtue of that connection become dissociated from other common procedures such as expert reports, inspections, performance reviews and other kinds of study. As the term evaluation is currently hip, chic and modern and has a scientific ring to it, it is increasingly used for procedures which themselves have by no means continued to develop in the direction of evaluation. It is therefore a good idea to make sure that evaluation is what is actually in the can when it says ‘evaluation’ on the label.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/51369
ISBN:	978-1-137-01247-0
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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