Dictionary of Qualitative Inquiry

Thomas A. Schwandt is Professor of Education in the Department of Educational Psychology in the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He also holds appointments in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the Department of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership. He has been a faculty member and a Fellow of the Poynter Center for Ethics and American Institutions at Indiana University, Bloomington and member of the faculty in medical education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His papers on qualitative methodology, issues in the philosophy of interpretive social science, and evaluation theory have appeared in a variety journals and edited books.

He is the author of Evaluation Foundations Revisited: Cultivating a Life of the Mind for Practice (Stanford University Press, 2015), Evaluation Practice Reconsidered (Peter Lang, 2002), and Evaluating Holistic Rehabilitation Praxis (Kommuneforlaget, Oslo, 2004); and co-author (with Kenneth Prewitt and Miron Straf) of Using Science as Evidence in Public Policy (National Academies Press, 2012) and (with Edward Halpern) of Linking Auditing and Meta-evaluation (Sage, 1988); co-editor (with Katherine Ryan) of Exploring Evaluator Role and Identity (Information Age Press, 2002), (with Peder Haug) of Evaluating Educational Reforms: Scandinavian Perspectives (Information Age Press, 2003), and (with Bridget Somekh) Knowledge Production: The Work of Educational Research in Interesting Times (Routldege, 2007). He was the editor of the American Journal of Evaluation from 2010-2014.


In 2002, he received the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award from the American Evaluation Association for his contributions to evaluation theory.