As Fetterman (1996), House and Howe (2000), Schnoes et al. (2000), and Torres et al.
(2000) explain, empowerment evaluation, as well as other forms of collaborative evaluation,
require intensive time and effort on the part of the stakeholders. A major barrier to the proposed
evaluation methods and my intended roles as an empowerment evaluator was my inability to
engage the consumer’s ongoing participation in many of the steps of the evaluation process.
Although the drop-in center valued consumer empowerment, it did not value “systematic
inquiry,” a primary ethical principle of evaluators, according to the American Evaluation
Association’s Guiding Principles for Evaluators (1995). Some consumers and staff openly
derided “intellectualization” as a pathological defense mechanism against genuine emotions.
Systematic inquiry, especially in assessing the value of an organization that many compared to
their home and family, was seen as a manifestation of this intellectualization. I had to respect
the consumers’ values as I worked with the drop-in center, and I worked to mold my evaluation
method around these values instead of insisting that the consumers conform to my values and
expectations.