Reasoning in Evaluation: Inferential Links and Leaps

Evaluators are in the business of reasoning their way toward legitimate conclusions that clients and other stakeholder groups can use. In everyday practice, evaluators collect and combine evidence to draw conclusions about something or someone. Reasoning is the basis for what evaluators do and what they tell their clients to do. But is the reasoning sound? Evaluative conclusions are often sources of controversy, and the inferences drawn from evidence always have potential loopholes for error. In what ways can the conclusions resulting from evaluations be trusted? How can evaluators reliably combine evidence from multiple sources into a final judgment about the merit or worth of something. How, and in what ways, can evaluative conclusions be justified in an objective way similar to empirical conclusions? Obtaining answers to these perennial questions facing evaluators in every evaluation is the field's greatest unmet challenge.
To stimulate debate and encourage more scholarship in this area the authors in this volume of New Directions for Evaluation grapple with some of the thorny problems of how to better understand the reasoning process that is used to establish evaluative conclusions. The reader will leave this discussion thinking more clearly and critically about logical practice, appreciating the central role of reasoning in the successful practice of evaluation, and pondering the various avenues by which to contribute to future developments.