Mathison ( 1999) has served as an internal and external evaluator and has
written often on the issue. She believes that internal and external evaluators face
the same ethical challenges but are part of different communities and that these
communities influence their responses to ethical challenges. Internal evaluators,
she asserts, operate within fewer communities than the external evaluator and
their primary community is the organization in which they work. Consider,
simply, the amount of time the typical internal evaluator spends in that organization
over weeks and years. External evaluators, in contrast, have many communities,
which can include the organizations they evaluate, the organization
that employs them, colleagues in evaluation and their professional association,
funding agencies, and others. These communities, Mathison argues, influence
evaluators’ ethical choices in many complex ways. For example, the internal
evaluator's closeness to the organization and relationships in it may enable her to
behave more ethically when it comes to creating an ongoing evaluative culture
in the organization or sustaining a dialogue about a controversial issue uncovered
by an evaluation-a dialogue that may be required to bring about change. In contra
st, the external evaluator's diversity of communities and greater distance from
the community of the organization being evaluated makes it easier for her to raise
questions concerning unethical issues in the program or in the organization.
Mathison's concept of the communities of reference for internal and external
evaluators is useful in considering the types of problems each can deal with
more effectively, and it helps us to recognize the complex influence of personal,
interpersonal, financial, and organizational factors on the ethical behavior of
evaluators.