Date: Saturday, January 10, 2026
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hi, I’m Amy Dorman. I serve as the Research Director for the Office of Justice Programs in the Minnesota Department of Public Safety and the Director of the Minnesota Statistical Analysis Center. I hold a PhD in Social Work and a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
In being asked to contribute to the conversation around evaluation theory, there were many directions I felt I could go. In a time of uncertainty and reinvigorated doubt in science, are we on the verge of a Kuhnian paradigm shift? As AI creates fake scholarly articles to present citations to unsuspecting users, what false theories might it be creating, and how do we combat this? But one thought lingered above all: What is theory? As evaluators, when we say “theory,” what are we talking about? Do we know? Do our clients know?
There is but one class that made me almost throw in the towel on my doctoral work, and that was my theory class. The trouble was our cohort was taking a quantitative methods course at the same time as the theory course. The instructors defined components of theory in different ways: one used “concepts” as “constructs,” and vice versa (this is not uncommon). This illustrates the how the term “theory,” and the components of theory, are often used differently across individual researchers and evaluators, disciplines, and broader schools of thought. It is no wonder we keep returning to this “What is theory?” conversation.
In my time as an evaluator, I have seen “theory” hungrily reached for by clients as a way to (understandably) justify and present their work as more rigorous to funders. “We are engaging in grounded theory,” I often heard, when what they were describing was actually thematic analysis – a method of understanding data, not theory-building.
We also run into the challenge of using “theory” as an umbrella term for paradigms, perspectives, theories, and approaches. We see subheadings in dissertations and articles describing “theoretical underpinnings,” and the like, that then go on to describe not a testable theory with concepts that hang together to explain a phenomenon, but a perspective – a way of viewing and understanding the world. This adds to our confusion.
The words we use are important. Carefully considering how often and in what context we use the term “theory” could help us rein in what has become a sprawling and unruly definition in our profession. Critically revisiting the question “What is theory?” would help us provide much-needed clarity – for ourselves and the people and organizations we serve through evaluation.
As evaluators, we are trained in and provide evaluation services across a spectrum of disciplines: social work, sociology, political science, economics, and the like. As many trained in evaluation will be familiar with the evaluation theory tree, I have shared resources from additional disciplines that may be useful tools for critically thinking about what we mean by “theory” and how to evaluate the soundness of a theory.
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