ABSTRACT
The view of quality-as-measured involves an approach to evaluation that involves a distancing-from-experience. From this standpoint discernments of quality involve ‘explicit comparison of the object in question with a set of standards for it’. Stake and Schwandt point out that from a quality-as-measured perspective the meaning of quality ‘is structured … by a set of constructs’ that tend to be derived not so much from the actions and language of the evaluand, as from the communities of discourse to which the evaluator belongs. The need to develop such standards stems, they suggest, from confrontational situations where ‘few people are willing to accept personal perceptions of quality from opponents’.
