Social Program Evaluation as a Reconstructive Hermeneutic

259 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004.This thesis sets forth a conception of social program evaluation as a reconstructive hermeneutic. Its purpose is twofold: to situate current discussions about evaluation's normatively grounded social action agenda within a more fundamental consideration of knowing and to explore the implications of a contemporary re-reading of the postmodern critique on program evaluation. The theoretical substance for these efforts is drawn from the philosophical discipline of phenomenological hermeneutics, specifically the work of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger's phenomenological concept of method is incorporated into a conceptual framework that recasts evaluation as a hermeneutic cycle of understanding and experiencing, which lets the evaluator come to know the program on an authentically "ontological basis" (Heidegger, 1996, p. 15). The operation of cycle, at theoretical and methodological levels, is expounded with a case example.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD