# Frame Methodology Pack -- Constructivist (`constructivist`)

**Source anchor:** Guba & Lincoln, *Fourth Generation Evaluation* (1989); Berger & Luckmann, *The Social Construction of Reality* (1966); Peck & Mummery (2023) on hermeneutic constructivism.
**Status:** Public-Evaluator. Loaded by Frame Host E3; readable by E2, E4, E5, E8, E9.

---

## 1. Methodology

Guba & Lincoln's **Fourth Generation Evaluation** replaces positivist validity with **trustworthiness**, operationalized through four parallel criteria: credibility (through prolonged engagement, persistent observation, triangulation, member checks), transferability (through thick description), dependability (through inquiry audit), and confirmability (through confirmability audit and reflexive journaling). Evaluation proceeds via a **hermeneutic-dialectic** process that surfaces stakeholders' **claims, concerns, and issues**, negotiates across rounds, and produces co-constructed conclusions rather than an auditor-imposed verdict.

Berger & Luckmann supply the ontological mechanism underneath: social reality is produced through **typification** -> habitualization -> institutionalization -> legitimation. Categories that appear as natural kinds are the sedimented outcome of this process. Peck & Mummery extend the constructivist tradition into hermeneutic-reflexive registers.

A constructivist audit asks: has the RAM claim reified typifications as natural kinds? Whose claims, concerns, and issues were admitted to the inquiry? Whose were silenced or pre-excluded by category framing? Is the audit trail readable back to stakeholder input, or has the analyst overwritten the hermeneutic record?

## 2. Claim Types Best-Audited

- Claims presupposing institutional categories (client, patient, at-risk youth, stakeholder, target market).
- Stakeholder-laden program evaluations.
- Claims whose evidence depends on social constructions the claim itself relies on.
- Policy-relevant claims where the unit of analysis is socially constituted.

## 3. Typical Weaknesses

- Full Fourth Generation implementations are sparse; many self-styled "constructivist" audits skip the hermeneutic-dialectic rounds.
- Relativism charge: trustworthiness across competing stakeholder framings can shade into "no ground at all."
- Weak on physical-causal claims, mechanism claims, and claims whose truth is independent of stakeholder recognition.
- Audit trail, done poorly, can inflate confirmability through procedural checklisting rather than substantive reflexivity.

## 4. Compatibility Profile (Three Kuhnian Dimensions)

- **Methodological signature:** hermeneutic-dialectic. Inquiry is multi-round, stakeholder-negotiated, reflexively journaled.
- **Semantic signature:** stakeholder-relative. Meaning is indexed to the claims-concerns-issues field a stakeholder coalition brings to the inquiry.
- **Ontological signature:** socially-constituted. What there is (in the claim's domain) is the outcome of typification-institutionalization-legitimation.

DISTINCT against all three RAM frames: S02 grades epistemic hierarchy independent of stakeholder position; S03 locates mechanisms in stratified reality prior to stakeholder negotiation; S08 measures informational redundancy as a sample-size property. Constructivism locates warrant in stakeholder-traceable co-construction on every dimension.

## 5. Retrieval Hook

- **Corpora:** stakeholder claims / concerns / issues logs; institutional histories of category formation; member-check artifacts; reflexive journals; negotiated-conclusion records.
- **Query style:** pair the claim with the stakeholder coalition that generated its categories; seek claims, concerns, and issues from stakeholders who would resist or complicate the framing.
- **Exclusion rules:** claims that treat constructed categories as natural kinds without reflexive marking; single-stakeholder evaluations presented as consensus.

## 6. Scoring Hook

- **axis_warrant:** trustworthiness, computed as the four-criterion composite (credibility / transferability / dependability / confirmability). Each criterion scored against its standard evidentiary procedures.
- **axis_fit:** stakeholder-claim coverage. Does the audit surface the relevant claims, concerns, and issues across the stakeholder coalition, or does it privilege one subset?
- **axis_robustness:** audit-trail completeness. Can the hermeneutic-dialectic rounds be reconstructed from the preserved record?
- **aggregation_rule:** `non_collapse` (architectural lock).

## 7. Termination Hook

- **rule_id:** `hermeneutic_dialectic_closure`.
- **minimum_artifacts:** stakeholder-coalition representation across at least 3 non-redundant position-types plus at least 2 member-check rounds.
- **closure_test:** claims, concerns, and issues stabilize across successive stakeholder rounds -- new rounds surface incremental elaboration rather than category-changing challenge.

## 8. Authors Cited

Guba, Lincoln, Berger, Luckmann, Peck & Mummery. No overlap with authors reserved for RAM S02 (Guyatt, Sterne, Hammersley), RAM S03 (Pawson, Tilley, Shadish, Cook, Campbell), or RAM S08 (Glaser, Saunders, Guest, Callaghan).
