The course is designed to provide social service professionals, community workers, policy-makers and researchers, with an introduction to theories and concepts of realist evaluation.

In community development and other fields of practice, interventions are often described as being complex and have outcomes that are dependent on context and are challenging to evaluate. Realist evaluation can help make sense of the outcomes from these types of interventions. Instead of providing one-off verdicts on its success or failure by asking, “Does the intervention work?”, realist evaluation examines “What works, for whom, under what circumstances and why?”. Recognising that interventions do not work in the same way for everyone, everywhere, realist evaluation seeks to systematically develop and test theory, specifically the causal mechanisms that are activated in different contexts, leading to different outcomes. It is multi-method and draws on both quantitative and qualitative methods.