Technical quality versus user responsiveness in evaluation practice

Use-oriented approaches to evaluation have been challenged by those contending that the responsiveness of such evaluations undermines their technical quality. This discussion analyzes the debate about purported conflicts between these evaluation criteria of utility and accuracy by surfacing and examining underlying assumptions related to evaluation's purpose and politics. The analysis suggests that this debate is actually about evaluation's "political inherency," rather than about the relative importance of metaevaluative criteria. (Editor's note: This paper continues the discussion of defining quality in evaluation that was begun in volume 13 (2). See the papers by Schwandt and Moran in that volume.).