structural:expansion
Discussion

However, the strict adherence to a set of methodological assumptions may make the field of evaluation more acceptable to a mainstream audience but this adherence will work towards preventing evaluators from developing new strategies for dealing with the myriad problems that programs face. It is claimed that only a minority of evaluation reports are used by the evaluand (client) (Data, 2006). One justification of this is that "when evaluation findings are challenged or utilization has failed, it was because stakeholders and clients found the inferences weak or the warrants unconvincing" (Fournier and Smith, 1993). Some reasons for this situation may be the failure of the evaluator to establish a set of shared aims with the evaluand, or creating overly ambitious aims, as well as failing to compromise and incorporate the cultural differences of individuals and programs within the evaluation aims and process. None of these problems are due to a lack of a definition of evaluation but are rather due to evaluators attempting to impose predisposed notions and definitions of evaluations on clients. The central reason for the poor utilization of evaluations is arguably due to the lack of tailoring of evaluations to suit the needs of the client, due to a predefined idea (or definition) of what an evaluation is rather than what the client needs are (House, 1980). The development of a standard methodology for evaluation will require arriving at applicable ways of asking and stating the results of questions about ethics such as agent-principal, privacy, stakeholder definition, limited liability; and could-the-money-be-spent-more-wisely issues.