Metaevaluation and Fiscal Auditing: Advice From the World of Accounting

Reviews the book, Linking Auditing and Metaevaluation: Enhancing Quality in Applied Research by Thomas A. Schwandt and Edward S. Halpern (see record 1988-97924-000). In this book authors have provided us with an extended analogy: Metaevaluation is to evaluation as auditing is to accounting. The analogy seems to work at a number of levels. It makes for an interesting and unusually thought-provoking book for the nonspecialist social scientist and provides very specific and helpful advice for the specialist. This book has a number of strengths. One of these, not inconsiderable in an essentially methodological book, is the authors' insistence on the importance of judgment and context in the interpretation of data. Another strength is the authors' broad point of view. This book provides an intriguing excursion into another discipline that has more to do with our lives as scientists than I ever suspected. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)