Section 66 The “why question” – asking about changes

66.1 “Changes”

I don’t think the right way to elicit information about someone’s causal map of a particular domain (e.g. in order to find out how a project influenced that domain) is to ask about changes since a certain time point. This is probably my biggest disagreement with the QuIP way of working.

One obvious counterexample:

the government stopped fixing the riverbank, but our NGO intervened to keep fixing it regularly. If someone doesn’t fix the riverbank, there are more floods.

If you ask about changes, in the literal sense, there won’t be any, because the intervention served to maintain the status quo. It might be there are contrast situations like other regions where the government withdrew and no-one stepped in, or a contrast with some previous situation, but there might not be. Either way, the question about changes will only work, if it works at all, because people implicitly understand that we really want to know about the whole causal map, not just a change over time. So why not ask that directly? Why not ask, “how do things work around here vis-a-vis floods? Why are there sometimes more or fewer floods?” This is what I like to call “the why question”.

BSDR has a whole wealth of experience and caveats re how to pose these questions, what works and what doesn’t as a question. So I’m hesitant to question this obviously effective way of working. But, as an evaluator I’ve often posed the alternative question, “how does X work around here?” and found it fine.