The evaluator's role in valuing: Who and with whom

The act of valuing in an evaluation may be perceived in different ways. We consider the multiple theoretic perspectives that govern an evaluator's behavior and present a typology of evaluator valuing roles. Within this typology we describe three ways in which value judgments are typically reached—by stakeholders alone, stakeholders and evaluators in consort with each other, or by evaluators only. This heuristic offers a more explicit understanding of how valuing occurs in evaluation. © Wiley Periodicals, Inc., and the American Evaluation Association.