Editorial:
Vulnerability to disproof: A soft social science approach to assessing claims of attribution. "How can you prove attribution?" is a question most readers will have heard, on more than one occassion. I am not sure if it still is, but the correct line in science was that we are not really in the business of proving things to be true. But what we can do is disprove things. All scientific claims are therefore in a sense provisional. So good science is about making testable claims and then seeing if they can be disproved. What use is that in the practically minded area of social science known as development studies? Well, we can make provisional assessments of claims that people make about having caused an outcome, on the basis of their vulnerability to disproof. This can be observed in two ways, and possibly more. One is that a theory with many detailed steps in the causal process leading to the observed outcome is more likely to be vulnerable to disproof than one with only two or three steps described in more generalised terms. The typical Logical Framework, with its four levels, does not provide us with a good start here. The second is the extent to which the story of change(short or long) is put out in the public realm or not, or kept with the organisation, or a section thereof. The more public the claim is, the more vulnerable to disproof it is. This view has implications for how we use theories of change. More emphasis could be given to developing a longer version of the story, by articulating more steps in the process of change. Less emphasis could be given to measuring the scale of achivement, when there are only a few big steps in a short story. When using Logical Frameworks multiple outputs can be used, as they sometimes are, to describe a series of sub-steps in the expected process of change. At the Purpose and Goal level, additional narrative statements can be used in the same way, but this practice is less common. (Posted 16/08/02)
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