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Most Significant Change

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Applications (why, when & where)

Most Significant Change (MSC) is a potentially useful evaluation tool given its simplicity and its use of storytelling to communicate experiences of change, and the who, why, how and why of an event or situation. This relatively new method is based on a qualitative, participatory approach, with stakeholders involved in all aspects of the evaluation and is therefore a shift away from conventional quantitative, expert driven evaluation methods toward a qualitative participant driven approach, focusing on the human impact of interventions. MSC is particularly useful for understanding if and how behavior change has occurred and how an intervention has contribuated to the change.

Brief description

Most Significant Change involves the generation of significant change stories by various stakeholders involved in an intervention. These are stories of significant changes caused by the intervention and can be adapted to also pick up on unexpected changes that may not have clear causal links to interventions. The ‘more significant’ of these stories are then selected by the stakeholders for depth discussions. This is the heart of the how use most significant change and where many go wrong These discussions bring to the stakeholders’ attention the impacts of the intervention that have the most significant affects on the lives of the beneficiaries (Davies and Dart, 2005).

Due to the relative simplicity of the approach, which is easy to explain and can be communicated well across cultures, and its emphasis on encouraging project participants to share their stories and experiences in a relatively unstructured and informal way, MSC was thought to be particularly relevant as a means to identify unexpected changes–both positive and negative. The technique has so far been widely, and has been found to elicit a number of unexpected positive project impacts from participants (see for example Sheriff and Schuetz, 2009).

Spatial scale

Local Since its original design, MSC has been used across scales, gathering stories from local sources and then using them to understand change across program scales.

Complexity

Simple to complex. With its emphasis on story collecting, the technique appears to work well with few potential constraints to effective assessment of impact. The crux of the matter is in how you form the right committees and processes to actually sift through all the stories that might emerge from a process (organically or not) to then decide which are indeed the most significant for whom and to what end.

For those applying the tool:

For participants:

Outcomes

The outcomes of MSC would be both the generation of information for evaluation as well as the empowerment of stakeholders who engage in telling their own stories of change.

Strengths

• Easy to explain and can be communicated well across cultures.

• Brings to the stakeholders attention the impacts of an intervention that has had the most significant affects on the lives of the beneficiaries.

• Identify unexpected changes–both positive and negative.

• Quantification of changes can be integrated into the collection of stories (See Step 8 in Davies and Dart, 2005)

Drawbacks

• Time consuming.

• Requires good interviewing skills. Many people have commented on the difficulty of eliciting good stories. This is often associated with how the question has been translated, particularly the word ‘significance’. People using the tool must be able to engage with people and elicit their views. If the question isn’t working, then you may need to re-phrase it carefully.

• Story tellers may feel, “Nothing has changed, so what can we report?” This response may suggest that respondents are looking for changes that can be defined as significant in some sort of absolute sense. It helps to ask respondents to look for any changes at all and then to identify those they think are the most significant, in relative terms, of all the changes they have noted.

• Stories can be open to broad interpretation and “reading in” significance that appeals to the evaluators.

For more detail on these and other drawbacks, see Davies and Dart, 2005.

Issues

What you get from MSC depends a great deal on what skills people have who are doing it, and how well they think through the various dimensions of power and exclusion.

Although the impact of the evaluation emerge in stories gathered from the community and other stakeholders, only certain individuals can be part of the story generation process. It is inevitable that some stories will not be considered and that the stories may not necessarily be representative of the entire community’s feelings. It is often the marginalized people within a society that are under-represented, and their significant stories may differ from those less marginalized people.

A second issue that has been identified is the generation of socially desirable stories by the community members. In addition, the community members may not understand the concept of a significant change story which may lead to valueless data (Willets and Crawford, 2007).

Meta-analysis is generally done in a less participatory way, often by the person in charge of monitoring and evaluation, or a specialist.

Resources

Time:

Human resources:

Costing:

Origins and history

The Most Significant Change Technique was developed by Rick Davies as part of his PhD on monitoring and evaluation of a rural development program in Bangladesh. At that time Davies named it "the evolutionary approach to organizational learning". Later Jess Dart experimented with MSC as part of her PhD and in 2000 Davies and Dart coined the term "Most Significant Change Technique" and wrote the User guide (Davies and Dart, 2005).

Conditions for use and dissemination

None.

Contacts

Marina Apgar Knowledge Sharing and Learning Scientist Jalan Batu Maung, Batu Maung,11960 Bayan Lepas, Penang, Malaysia [m.apgar@cgxchange.org] www.worldfishcenter.org

Learn more about this topic

Most Significant Change is now widely used by development aid agencies, especially NGOs. The original MSC Guide has since been translated into 13 languages (Arabic, Bangla, French, Hindi, Bahasa Indonesian, Japanese, Malayalam, Russian, Sinhala, Tamil, Spanish and Urdu), typically by organizations working within those language groups.

See Translations of the Most Significant Changes" Guide.

Since 2000 there has been an active and global [http:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice| community of practice] that shares experiences with the use of Most Significant Change in different settings. As of 2013 [http:groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/MostSignificantChanges/info| the Most Significant Change egroup] has 1,500 members. Members have accumulated a collection of more than 80 documents describing the use of Most Significant Change across 28 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas.

References

Government of Australia. 2010. Most significant change. Accessed 20 December, 2013 at

Dart, J. and Davies, R, 2003. A Dialogical, Story-Based Evaluation Tool: The Most Significant Change Technique". American Journal of Evaluation, 24 (2): 137–155.

Davies. R. and Dart, J. 2005. The Most Significant Change (MSC) Technique: A Guide to Its Use. CARE International, United Kingdom, Oxfam Community Aid Abroad, Australia, Government of South Australia, Oxfam New Zealand, Christian Aid, United Kingdom, Exchange, United Kingdom, Ibis, Denmark, Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke (MS), Denmark, and Lutheran World Relief, United States of America. Accessed 20 December, 2013 at [[1]]

Sheriff, N., and Schuetz, T. 2008. Monitoring for change, assessing for impact: the WorldFish Center experience. Paper submitted for the workshop on Rethinking Impact: Understanding the Complexity of Poverty and Change, Cali, Colombia 26‐29 March 2008. WorldFish Center, Penang, Malaysia. And International Water Management Institute, Accra, Ghana. Accessed 20 December, 2013 at [[2]]

Willetts, J. and Crawford, P. 2007. The most significant lessons about the most significant change technique. Development in Practice, 17(3): 367–379.