A Dialogical, Story-Based Evaluation Tool: The Most Significant Change Technique

The Most Significant Change (MSC) technique is a dialogical, story-based technique. Its primary purpose is to facilitate program improvement by focusing the direction of work towards explicitly valued directions and away from less valued directions. MSC can also make a contribution to summative evaluation through both its process and its outputs. The technique involves a form of continuous values inquiry whereby designated groups of stakeholders search for significant program outcomes and then deliberate on the value of these outcomes in a systematic and transparent manner. To date, MSC has largely been used for the evaluation of international development programs, after having been initially developed for the evaluation of a social development program in Bangladesh (Davies, 1996). This article provides an…