“It Has to Be the Common Thread”: Weaving Attention to Racial Equity and Justice Across Lines of Inquiry and Evaluative Criteria

Abstract

Evaluators must attend to the destructive forces of racialization and racism to contribute to social transformation. Thus, evaluators are called to center culture, context, equity, and social justice during each step of the evaluation process. Here, we focus on the step(s) in which evaluators define program quality and specify evaluative lines of inquiry. We interviewed 29 social justice-oriented evaluators to examine lines of inquiry for programs in which racial equity or justice played a role. Our findings illuminate the definitions of quality and lines of inquiry evaluators pursued and the values that shaped those definitions of quality. We document empirical examples of how evaluators were responsive to contexts and communities and navigated pre-set lines of inquiry. Our findings further illuminate how evaluators can weave attention to racial equity and justice as the “common thread” across lines of inquiry and create opportunities and structures for centering racial equity and justice.