Most significant change technique

MSC enables the identification of the kinds of changes people value, why they value those changes and the extent to which they share those views with others. MSC stories, and discussions of these, can also shed light on the causal processes that generated the changes, and implications for actions that could be taken in response to those changes.^[4]

The focus is on learning rather than accountability. Managers, field staff and evaluation team members can be asked to reflect on and openly question the intervention programme and their interactions with the community in which the intervention takes place. Its use can also support other M&E processes, for example by identifying the aspects of the intervention which could benefit from more quantitative investigations. In addition, the process can give the evaluators a greater sensitivity to the perspectives of beneficiaries, which it could be argued, may be conducive to more successful outcomes.^[8]

1. MSC is a participatory process that emphasizes dialogue. This can be time-consuming. Both participants and facilitators of an MSC exercise may have other pressing demands on their time
2. The elicitation of individual MSC stories and the facilitation of discussions about multiple MSC stories both require some skill, in interviewing and small group facilitation
3. Participants will often have concerns and reservations about the meaning of "significance", the acceptability of subjectivity and the appearance of competition, which need to be addressed
4. The process as described by Davies and Dart in 2005 may be incompletely implemented. Changes may be adequately described but explanations of their significance may be cursory or absent (Step 4). MSC stories may be collected then not followed by a selection process (Step 5). Feedback of the choices made between a set of MSC stories, to the original providers of those stories, may be forgotten (Step 6)

These and other challenges are discussed in Chapter 3: Troubleshooting in the 2005 MSC Guide ^[4]

MSC 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 organisations working within those language groups.^[9]

Since 2000 there has been an active and global "community of practice" that shares experiences with the use of MSC in different settings. The email list used by this group is currently hosted by Google Groups.

More recently, an online bibliography has accumulated information on the global use of MSC . References are now available on more than 290 papers and reports that have been published on the use of MSC. These cover both developed and developing countries and relate to interventions in a wide range of sectors – including health, education, agriculture, infrastructure, governance, and community development.^[10]