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Cognitive Processes, Social Mores, and the Accumulation of Data

Program Evaluation and the Status Quo

Northwestern University

Distortion and selective disclosure limit data available to program evaluators, producing a bias that tends to maintain the status quo. Paradoxically, attempts to objectify, regulate, or depersonalize the production of data only increase the potential for distortion. A reliance on the data produced by science is not necessarily a solution. Social science tends to be a self-legitimizing specialty that forces our understanding of social situations into historically accepted categories and relationships without specifying methods for testing the validity of these findings. An awareness of status quo tendencies raises prob lems for evaluators interested in innovation and change.

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