ERIC Number: EJ1475008
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025-Jun
Pages: 24
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1098-2140
EISSN: EISSN-1557-0878
Available Date: 0000-00-00
"It Has to Be the Common Thread": Weaving Attention to Racial Equity and Justice across Lines of Inquiry and Evaluative Criteria
American Journal of Evaluation, v46 n2 p241-264 2025
Evaluators must attend to the destructive forces of racialization and racism to contribute to social transformation. Thus, evaluators are called to center culture, context, equity, and social justice during each step of the evaluation process. Here, we focus on the step(s) in which evaluators define program quality and specify evaluative lines of inquiry. We interviewed 29 social justice-oriented evaluators to examine lines of inquiry for programs in which racial equity or justice played a role. Our findings illuminate the definitions of quality and lines of inquiry evaluators pursued and the values that shaped those definitions of quality. We document empirical examples of how evaluators were responsive to contexts and communities and navigated pre-set lines of inquiry. Our findings further illuminate how evaluators can weave attention to racial equity and justice as the "common thread" across lines of inquiry and create opportunities and structures for centering racial equity and justice.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1University of Illinois Chicago, College of Education, Chicago, IL, USA; 2University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA; 3University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA