14th July 2014 by Jonny Morell
This week’s blog is from Jonny Morell, editor of Evaluation and Program Planning and author of Evaluation in the Face of Uncertainty: Anticipating Surprise and Responding to the Inevitable.
Many evaluations and logic models only focus on intended outcomes and impacts - but positive or negative unintended results can be important too.
Use these options before a program is implemented to identify possible unintended outcomes and impacts, especially negative impacts (that make things worse not better) that should also be investigated and tracked.
Make sure your data collection remains open to unintended results that you have not anticipated by including some open-ended questions in interviews and questionnaires, and by encouraging reporting of unexpected results.
Most programme theories, logic models and theories of change show how an intervention is expected to contribute to positive impacts. Negative programme theory, a technique developed by Carol Weiss, shows how it might produce negative impacts.
