Credible Judgment: Combining Truth, Beauty, and Justice

Abstract

AbstractThe research summarized in this chapter provides descriptive evidence to support House's vision of validity by expanding connections with his theory to a wide variety of professions, in addition to professional evaluators. Perhaps these results and discussion of them and the emerging model will invite professionals to reflect upon ways to improve their own evaluative judgments. Case study interviews were conducted in Canada and the United States with 27 professionals from many helping professions, including law and law enforcement, social work, medicine, education, business, sports, and chaplaincy. Participants were asked to discuss examples of successful and less successful evaluative judgments they had made in their professional work. Citing patterns discovered through analysis of these contrasting examples, we linked their experiences to House's framework regarding truth, beauty, and justice as foundations for validity. This research thus generated a descriptive model of a process to produce credible evaluation judgments with six interacting elements: (1) credible judgments evolve through an iterative process; (2) frameworks, protocols, and methods may help professionals generate valid evidence, but they are often not sufficient; (3) stakeholders’ involvement is essential, and how they participate varies depending on the circumstances; (4) the path required to generate a credible judgment is rarely linear; (5) credible judgment is based on strong argumentation that is properly developed and aesthetically presented; (6) the production of credible judgments depends on special dispositions, orientations, or qualities of the professionals.