Realist Evaluation - Hunting for
Generative Causality
with Jeph Mathias
22 & 23rd October
10am - 2pm
In evaluating programmes our brief is often more than “did it work?”. In many situations, particularly if advising on policy, ours is a much more complex question: “What worked for whom, when where and why?” Enter Realist Evaluation.
In the first session we first explore realist philosophy, situated between descriptive constructivist and “scientific” positivist ways of knowing. We then look at Initial Programme Theories (what are IPT’s? Where do they come from? How can we as evaluators help develop them?) and Middle Range Theories (MRTs)and what they add. The second workshop is about testing and refining theories. We practice Realist interviewing, trying to gather realist data and analyse it to yield Context-Mechanism-Outcome (CMO) triads, our central data in a Realist Evaluation. Finally, we try synthesising everything from philosophy to analysis into refined theories of generative causation and advice based on that evidence.
We’ll throw around ideas about how the socio-environmental world, our evaluators’ niche, works and how we know that. We’ll role play interviews, entering with theories and leaving with refined theories, we’ll use with thought experiments and ponder what case studies might be telling us about causal mechanisms. The workshops will be interactive and fun, a thinking, practicing and playing space that will give you an idea of what RE is, what it does and how. However, this is not a RE skills workshop. If you have no experience with RE you will not leave these sessions able to plan, design and implement your own RE. At the close I’ll test the water for interest in a full 5 day hands on RE skills workshop early next year.
“Jeph Mathias is an Independent evaluator based in Ōtautahi. Among his past lives are Emergency Doctor; stained glass artist, teacher in an illegal multiracial school in Apartheid South Africa and crocodile trapper in the Amazon. The connecting theme is his search for why the world is as it is, how he can contribute to a more just and sustainable planet and why there's so little snow at Broken River ski field this year."