Evaluation: A Profession?

To Be or Not to Be a Profession: Pros, Cons and Challenges for Evaluation

“…physicians, psychologists) performing such activities are required to be credentialled or licensed. Without these qualifications, one is forbidden to perform these activities and could be charged with a crime (Merwin and Weiner, 1985). However, the application of this principle to evaluation brings up the question of determining who the 'receiving public' of evaluation is.…”

“…is not clear. The authors focus on the approach or the role that they favour and argue that it is difficult, indeed impossible, to bring together all the points of view into a collective consensus (Merwin and Weiner, 1985;Smith, 1999). Many authors recognize the difficulty, or impossibility, of elaborating professional norms which would be broad enough to apply to the ensemble of activities and roles filled by an evaluator, no matter what his/her status (e.g.…”

“…Up to the present, the principal debates argued and published on the professionalization of evaluation have essentially concerned the United States and focus on the situation of the American Evaluation Association (AEA). These debates primarily consist of articles or chapters in books that present the point of view of the author and his position in favour of or against the approaches that the AEA hopes to develop (Altschuld, 1999a(Altschuld, , 1999bBickman, 1999;Smith, 1999;Worthen, 1999), the conditions and characteristics that a profession should possess and how they are reached by evaluation (Love, 1994;Merwin and Weiner, 1985;Morell and Flaherty, 1978;Worthen, 1994) or inquiries with members of the community to assess their professional identity (Modarresi et al, 2001) or to measure their degree of membership against the mechanisms of professionalization (Levin-Rozalis and Shochot-Reich, 2009). These latter studies have a broader international scope that testifies to the propagation of this preoccupation in the field of evaluation.…”