My goodness me: here I have been, bumbling along advising psychiatrists on research methods, and all the while a whole new evaluation industry seems to have been growing up around me. It has its own professional organizations, such as the American Evaluation Association, or the Australasian Evaluation Society, it has its own ethical codes, and, of course, its own journals and massive multi‐authored textbooks. Sage Publishers seem to be at the epicenter of all this activity, publishing the journal Evaluation (1995‐), the Evaluation Studies Review Annual, which seems to have kicked off way back in 1976, and a whole string of handbooks. Just recent examples from a library close at hand to me include Stern (2005), Mertens (2005), Alkin (2004), Rossi et al. (2004), Robson (2000), and Clarke (1999). A few other publishers have got in on the act too – Phillips (2006), Kellaghan and Stufflebean (2003) or Lazenbatt (2002) are just a few of the examples I picked up in the course of my enquiries, along with the Evaluation Journal of Australasia (they seem to be big on evaluation down under) and the New Directions in Evaluation monograph series. A few hours in King's College library left me lurking behind a barricade of brick‐thick tomes crammed full of the most astonishingly turgid prose I have ever ploughed through.
There seems to be a special language which is taught to American associate professors of the social sciences, designed not to communicate but to obfuscate, not to be concise but to fill as much paper as possible, and, above all, designed to avoid the precise monosyllables that form the Anglo‐Saxon core of the English language in favor of a smokescreen of monotonous polysyllables. I am sure that this is, in part, due to the continuing jealousy that social scientists feel towards real scientists. Real scientists are often very difficult to understand it is true. Usually however, this is because they are trying to cram a great deal of highly complex information into a very small space, rather than because they are trying to pad it out. A letter in Nature can be the making of a scientist's career but can be very difficult to understand, because the authors know that they have to compress the results of several years of work by a whole research team into a space not much longer than this review, in such a way as to be comprehensible to their immediate peers. I do not get the impression that any of the contributors to any of these volumes felt that this was the making of their careers, or that they have something exciting to communicate to the fascinated reader. I may be wronging them, soured by the self‐inflicted task of spending the whole of a sunny day stuck in a library grinding my way through the evaluation literature while just outside my window the Easter holiday crowds are happily perambulating the banks of the Thames. Nevertheless all the contributions to all of these books and journals feel to me more like “one more item to tick off on my CV”. Sage has commissioned a thick volume so I have to put in twenty pages for my contribution: how shall I fill it out in such a way as not to show that the emperor, if not actually naked, is at least fairly skimpily clad; rather than I have got something interesting that I am simply bursting to communicate.
To be fair, there is some lip‐service made here to the idea of communicating. This book notes “the importance of writing in a clear accessible style, a style that is direct, relatively free of jargon, and not convoluted with an abundance of complex syntactic and passive voice constructions”. It is a pity that the editors did not circulate this quotation to all their contributors, with fixed penalties for ignoring it. The book might have been considerably slimmer (and cheaper) and more comprehensible if they had.
What then is evaluation? It is, in fact, what all of us do all the time. This book suggests that “evaluation is a natural part of humans' everyday life”. I would personally extend this from humans, to saying that evaluation is the prime distinction between the animate and the inanimate. If you place an amoeba on a watch‐glass and put a drop of vinegar to one side, it will evaluate the change to its environment and then it will make a policy decision to move away. There is a clear distinction, which I confess that I had not appreciated before, between research and evaluation, and again, between evaluation and implementation. When the editor of Reference Reviews offered me this book to review I must admit that I had expected something more on the lines of a handbook of research methodology – interviewing and survey design, methods of statistical analysis, mathematical modeling, meta‐analysis of clinical trials (a perennial request), qualitative research techniques etc, or, alternatively perhaps, a handbook on social policy and evidence‐based practice. I can see now that there is an evaluating stage between the carrying out of a piece of social research and the act of making changes in social policy. Policy makers are increasingly being expected to submit to auditing and to accountability for their decisions. Whether this stage really requires a different set of professional people, with their own massive professional literature, I am still unconvinced. It still seems to me that social research and evaluation are too closely intertwined to make the distinction useful to the people who have to administer changes in social policy or to audit the effects of such changes. If evaluators are to make themselves useful they must learn to communicate more clearly, and, above all, more succinctly, than the professional literature that I have been evaluating would suggest.
Academic libraries catering for courses in evaluation studies will obviously need this book (I suspect there are dozens of them). Libraries catering for trainee social researchers and/or social policy‐makers may find it to be a useful adjunct. It seems to me to be unlikely that anyone would want to read this out of general interest, so public libraries probably do not need to consider it.
