140 - Investigating Equity and Social Justice within Programs: An Emerging Framework of Evaluative Criteria

Abstract Information: As new evaluation faculty, we offer an emerging framework to build evaluation theory about evaluative criteria and inspire and support evaluators in advancing equity and social justice through the lines of inquiry they pursue. The AEA Guiding Principles emphasize that evaluators have a professional and ethical responsibility to contribute to the “advancement of an equitable and just society”. Evaluation theorists have outlined several ways evaluators can fulfill this responsibility, such as using social justice-oriented and decolonizing evaluation approaches, attending to power and privilege in evaluation and program contexts, and partnering with communities who are involved with and affected by the program. In addition, evaluators can examine how programs being evaluated advance equity and social justice—or reinforce or exacerbate inequity and injustice. That is, evaluators can focus on issues of equity and social justice within the program through the evaluative criteria and lines of empirical inquiry they prioritize. However, there is a limited knowledge base about the specific criteria and lines of inquiry evaluators might investigate when examining issues of equity and social justice in the programs they study. To address this gap, this poster presents a research-backed framework that delineates 11 domains in which a program’s contribution to equity and social justice might be examined. The framework can support and guide evaluators in defining equity- and social justice-focused criteria and then using those criteria to shape evaluation questions, performance indicators, and evaluative conclusions.