Consumer-oriented evaluation

From EvaluationWiki

When program evaluation began to emerge as a profession in the second half of the twentieth century, it was largely management-driven, simply because management wanted to know how their programs were performing and had the resources to hire professional help to investigate this. That meant a focus on whether the goals of the program had been met. But that focus leaves out a great deal that is of interest to the consumer, such as the quality of the product, which is often a very different matter from its success in racking up sales. The most important movement towards consumer-oriented evaluation originated in the 1930s with a collusion between an engineer, a philosopher, and an academic economist that came to be called Consumers Union. It survived during the depression largely because of union support for its efforts to identify consumer products that were good buys at low cost. In the early days, its publications were black-listed by the newspaper publishers, who saw it as threatening to their advertising revenue; at the beginning of World War II, it was listed as a subversive organization by the U.S. Attorney-General. Another major force in consumer-oriented evaluation that quickly developed after WWII was the road tests of automobiles in the car enthusiast publications. This point of view finally emerged in professional program evaluation in the 1970s, perhaps most radically incorporated in the concept of goal-free evaluation where the evaluator is not even informed about the goals of the program, and uses as the measure of merit the extent to which the relevant needs of the consumers are met. Today, good evaluation generally tries to cover both points of view.