This article argues that certain threats to validity arise from the social, rather than
methodological, consequences of research design. The need for an evaluator to attend to
both methodological and social concerns is demonstrated by an example where the
unchecked effects of the social consequences of a methodologically rigorous research
design invalidated most of a planned evaluation. A second example is presented in which
explicit trade-off decisions between methodological rigor and social costs enabled the
evaluation effort to proceed.
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