ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the developmental interview process and interpretive methods to provide a greatly enriched understanding of the complexity of collaboration. The literature on collaboration is scattered across disciplines with an enormous range of methodological approaches, including contrived experiments, e-mail or social networking analyses, ethnography, Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), interactive games, program designs, organizational issues, class projects from elementary to graduate school, and of course, the ubiquitous "how to" manuals for organizational improvement. The chapter considers what people need to do to construct effective collaborative assessments of individuals and groups involved in learning, innovating, and discovering. A conversation about religion and politics provides a good starting place to begin the evaluation of the collaboration rubrics. It provides a reminder to developmental interviewers, that they need to restrict their roles to knowledge of development without letting their knowledge or opinions in other areas interfere with the insights of the expert they are interviewing.
