In case you’re wondering why we’re blessed with a multitude of terms for evaluations that use theory in some shape or fashion – theory-oriented evaluation, theory-based evaluation, theory-driven evaluation, program theory evaluation, intervening mechanism evaluation, theoretically relevant evaluation research, and program theory-driven evaluation science (Donaldson, 2022, p. 9) – the answer is in an XKCD comic:
References
Donaldson, S. I. (2022). Introduction to Theory-Driven Program Evaluation (2nd ed.). Routledge.
