1998 · Study · English
Evaluating ‘Communities that Care
Farrington, D.
Farrington, D. (1998). Evaluating ‘Communities that Care. Evaluation, 4(2), 204–210. doi.org/10.1177/13563899822208536
Summary
Short rejoinder in the journal Evaluation, part of an early British exchange on how CTC should be evaluated. Farrington (1997) had proposed an evaluation design for the UK pilot of Communities that Care; Pawson and Tilley (1998) had criticised it from the standpoint of ‘scientific realism’. Farrington agrees that comparing research designs is useful but argues that most of the criticism rests on a different picture of what CTC is: he treated it as a well-developed technology ready for testing, whereas Pawson and Tilley treated it as an iterative, loosely defined and highly variable procedure still in need of exploratory work – a description he thinks fits realist evaluation better than CTC. He adds that he has no personal stake in CTC and recommended it only as the best-developed vehicle for risk-focused prevention. Useful for anyone designing a European evaluation: it lays out the choice between testing CTC as a defined intervention and studying it as a developing process.