Trustworthiness in evaluation practice: an emphasis on the relational.

As canons for trustworthiness developed explicitly in the discourse of qualitative inquiry, the emphasis was on procedural matters rather than fundamentally relational ones. A nod was made to the relational in such strategies as "member checks" but the issues of how the evaluator actually relates to participants and to the larger communities of practice and discourse--matters subsumed under moral principles and ethical standards--were often marginalized. This chapter posits that the first consideration in designing and conducting rigorous evaluation inquiry, and in critiquing the results of any research, should be the study's trustworthiness.