Public Oral Defense: Padma Kannan

Making Sense of Equity: Understanding Equity in Evaluation Practice

Advisor: Dr. John LaVelle

The concept of equity has gained significant traction globally in recent years, becoming a topic of discussion across local, international, and various professional domains, including evaluation. As a multifaceted idea, equity can be interpreted through different perspectives, often leading to varied understandings. In the field of evaluation, theories, practices, and scholarly work approach equity using diverse rationales and ideological foundations. Equity considerations permeate the entire evaluation process, from the evaluators' power, position, biases, and privileges to the selection of methodologies and outcomes. Given the growing emphasis on equity in contemporary evaluation discourse, it is crucial for the field to develop a more comprehensive understanding of equity's practical implications. This dissertation employs sensemaking theory to investigate practitioners' comprehension of equity and its application in relation to identities, program environments, and power structures surrounding the evaluation process. Through semi-structured interviews, the study explores how individual practitioners conceptualize equity and how its meaning has evolved through the labeling of ideas and actions as "equity" within the evaluation process. The research aims to uncover the nuances of evaluation practices when practitioners actively pursue equity-advancing efforts in their work.

In person: 205 Burton Hall

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Online via Zoom