Compare methods

	Theory of Change Evaluation	Realist Evaluation
Field	Public Policy	Public Policy
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1995	1997
Originator	Carol Weiss; Connell & Kubisch; Funnell & Rogers	Ray Pawson & Nick Tilley
Type	Theory-based program evaluation framework	Theory-driven, generative evaluation approach
Seminal source	Weiss, C. H. (1995). Nothing as practical as good theory: Exploring theory-based evaluation for comprehensive community initiatives for children and families. In J. P. Connell, A. C. Kubisch, L. B. Schorr, & C. H. Weiss (Eds.), New Approaches to Evaluating Community Initiatives: Concepts, Methods, and Contexts (pp. 65–92). Washington, DC: The Aspen Institute. ISBN: 9780898431674	Pawson, R., & Tilley, N. (1997). Realistic Evaluation. London: SAGE Publications. ISBN: 9780761950097
Aliases	Theory-Based Evaluation, ToC Evaluation, Theory-of-Change Approach, Outcomes Pathway Evaluation	Realistic Evaluation, Theory-Driven Realist Evaluation, CMO Configuration Analysis, Pawson-Tilley Evaluation
Related	3	4
Summary	Theory of change evaluation is a theory-based approach that evaluates a program against an explicit map of how and why it is expected to produce its intended outcomes. Rooted in Carol Weiss's work on theory-based evaluation and the Aspen Institute's community-initiatives projects of the 1990s, it requires evaluators to articulate the full causal pathway from activities through short- and intermediate-term outcomes to a long-term goal, make the underlying assumptions explicit, and then collect evidence to test whether each link in that chain holds in practice. The theory of change serves simultaneously as a planning tool and as the framework against which the program's progress and plausibility are judged.	Realist evaluation is a theory-driven approach to evaluating programs and policies that asks not simply 'does it work?' but 'what works, for whom, in what circumstances, and why?'. Developed by Ray Pawson and Nick Tilley in their 1997 book Realistic Evaluation, it treats interventions as theories incarnate: programs offer resources or opportunities that trigger underlying mechanisms of reasoning and response in participants, and those mechanisms only fire in particular contexts. The unit of analysis is the Context-Mechanism-Outcome (CMO) configuration, and the goal is to build and refine middle-range theory that explains differential outcomes across settings.