Authentic

From EvaluationWiki

Literally of course this just means genuine, true, the real thing. But it has acquired a special meaning as a term of approbation in qualitative research, meaning that it represents and preferably relates real experience, not inferential conclusions or observations by a distant observer. And it has another meaning in the evaluation field, for which the terms 'adherence' and 'compliance' are also used; here it means the extent to which the program or other evaluand being scrutinized is in fact an instance of the type which it claims to exemplify, for example an instance of the "Success for All" approach to teaching reading. See also the next entry.