Applying a theory of change approach to the evaluation of comprehensive community initiatives: Progress, prospects, and problems. In New approaches to evaluating community initiatives, Vol. 2: Theory, Measurement, and Analysis

Since its birth in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the field of comprehensive community initiatives (CCIs) has been struggling to find evaluation strategies and methodologies that correspond well to the goals and designs of the initiatives themselves. Up to this point, CCIs have had three general options to follow: (1) retreat to process documentation of the initiatives and greatly reduce expectations about obtaining credible evidence of their impacts; (2) try to "force fit " the initiatives themselves into the procrustean bed of existing and accepted evaluation methods in order to estimate their impacts; and (3) put off evaluating CCIs until the initiatives are more "mature " and "ready " to be evaluated using existing strategies. The field needs better options than these. Specifically, the field is seeking alternative approaches to evaluating CCIs that will meet both the need to estimate these initiatives ' effects on interim and longer-term outcomes and the need for information on how the interventions produce those outcomes. This paper is a progress report on one such approach. In this paper, we present what we are calling a "theory of change approach " to evaluating CCIs. We describe three stages in carrying out this approach: • surfacing and articulating a theory of chang