Confronta i metodi

	Realist Evaluation	Theory of Change Evaluation
Campo	Public Policy	Public Policy
Famiglia	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Anno di origine	1997	1995
Ideatore	Ray Pawson & Nick Tilley	Carol Weiss; Connell & Kubisch; Funnell & Rogers
Tipo	Theory-driven, generative evaluation approach	Theory-based program evaluation framework
Fonte seminale	Pawson, R., & Tilley, N. (1997). Realistic Evaluation. London: SAGE Publications. ISBN: 9780761950097	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
Alias	Realistic Evaluation, Theory-Driven Realist Evaluation, CMO Configuration Analysis, Pawson-Tilley Evaluation	Theory-Based Evaluation, ToC Evaluation, Theory-of-Change Approach, Outcomes Pathway Evaluation
Correlati	4	3
Sintesi	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.	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.