Designing Evaluations: Researchers’ Insights Interview of Five Experts

Abstract

The objective of this chapter is to understand approaches conducted by experts to design an evaluation. It investigates the evaluation methods used by five disciplines (cognitive science, cognitive psychology, sociology, ethology, and ergonomics), in order to deduce the similarities and differences between these disciplines. In our qualitative survey, we asked five experts to reason on three research questions. These experts received instructions that consisted to explain how they would proceed to answer these questions. We then qualitatively analyzed experts’ explanations, which means that this chapter is the interpretation of both authors and cannot be generalized, even if it gives several interesting avenues worth exploring. In their responses, we mainly observed three different systems of thought which all lead to the same conclusion that seems to be a strong consensus that all research questions can be answered with a comparative study.