The Consumer-Oriented Evaluation Approach
Like the expertise-oriented approach, consumer-oriented evaluation has existed in the practice of individuals making decisions about what to purchase, or trade, for centuries. The approaches are similar in other ways: Their primary purpose is to judge the quality of something, to establish the value, the merit or worth, of a product, program, or policy. Although all evaluations are concerned with deter- mining merit or worth, valuing is the key component of these two approaches.5
Their principal audience is the public. Unlike approaches that will be discussed in other chapters in this section, evaluations relying on these approaches often do not have another audience—a foundation, manager, policymaker, or citizens’ group—who has hired the evaluator to provide them with useful information to
5Other evaluation approaches focus on various types of use, such as stakeholder involvement or organi- zational change, and methodology, such as establishing causality or providing thick descriptions as the central component. These evaluations, too, may ultimately make a judgment of merit or worth, but that judgment, the valuing of the program or product, is not so central to the evaluation approach as it is in expertise-oriented or consumer-oriented evaluation. (See Alkin [2004], Shadish et al. [1991].)
make a decision or judgment. Instead, the audience for consumer-oriented and expertise-oriented approaches is a broader one—the purchasing or interested public—and is not directly known to the evaluator. Therefore, the evaluator is the major, often the only, decision maker in the study because he or she does not have other important, direct audiences to serve. But the consumer-oriented approach and the expertise-oriented approach differ dramatically in their methodologies, with the latter relying on the judgments of experts and the arts as a model. On the other hand, consumer-oriented evaluation relies on more transparent and quan- titative methods, with the judgment typically being made by an evaluator, a person with expertise in judging things, but not with the particular content expertise of expertise-oriented or connoisseur evaluations.
Popular examples of consumer-oriented evaluations that the reader will know include Consumer Reports and the U.S. News and World Report ratings of colleges and universities, but examples exist around the world. Which? is a magazine and web site in the United Kingdom that serves a mission similar to that of the Consumers’ Union, the sponsor of Consumer Reports and its web site, in the United States. Both organizations act as consumer advocates and test products to provide information to consumers on the effectiveness of various products.