Most Significant Change for Development
The Most Significant Change (MSC) technique is a participatory, story-based approach to monitoring and evaluating development programmes that dispenses with predefined indicators. Developed by Rick Davies and elaborated with Jess Dart in their widely used 2005 guide, it works by systematically collecting stories of significant change from those closest to a programme and then filtering and selecting the most significant of them through deliberative panels at successive levels of the organisational hierarchy. The result is a structured, dialogical account of what stakeholders themselves judge to be the most important outcomes of an intervention.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Davies, R., & Dart, J. (2005). The 'Most Significant Change' (MSC) Technique: A Guide to Its Use. CARE International, Oxfam, et al. · URL
- Dart, J., & Davies, R. (2003). A Dialogical, Story-Based Evaluation Tool: The Most Significant Change Technique. American Journal of Evaluation, 24(2), 137-155. · DOI 10.1177/109821400302400202
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.