What exactly is ‘best practice’? April 2, 2009
Posted by Paul Duignan in : Evaluation debates, Impact evaluation, Outcomes theory, Philosophy of science, Use of terms, Using the approach , add a commentIdentifying and communicating best practice is widely recommended in many sectors and disciplines. But I’ve sometimes wondered as I’ve sagely recommended in a serious voice, ‘I think that we should use an approach based on identifying and implementing best practice here’ exactly what best practice is? I think that doing it is often a good idea and I can work out how to identify it and share it, and I will blog about that tomorrow, but what I’m not clear on is exactly how we define ‘best’ in the term ‘best practice’. It’s not clear whether best practice consists of: 1) claims that practitioners, from their own experience, believe the practices concerned to be feasible and ‘useful’ to implement; or 2) practices which have been proven to improve high-level outcomes (through making a strong outcome/impact evaluation claim of some sort such as is made using some of the types of designs listed here). (more…)
If all knowledge is subjective, why listen to evaluators? March 24, 2009
Posted by Paul Duignan in : Outcomes theory & politics, Philosophy of science , 1 comment so farThis week I’m blogging on a Rich Dialog Process (RDP) I facilitated recently on the interface between research (and evaluation) and policy. Check out my last couple of blog postings for more information on the actual process. One of the most interesting moments for me was a relatively short interchange around the issue of research ‘agendas’ and subjectivity and objectivity in research. I decided that given the range of issues we had to cover in the RDP there was not enough time to get right into this topic, important though it is, and the participants did not seem to want to get into it at that moment, so we moved on. However, this is an issue which I’ve been interested in for a long time. (more…)