[DSRP Evidence](https://dsrpevidence.org/)

# Is It Systems Thinking or Just Good Practice in Evaluation?

## Details

**Authors** Rogers P

**Year** 2008

**Publisher** Evaluation and Program Planning 31(3):325-326

**Kind of work** article

**Discipline** Systems Science

**Secondary disciplines** Public Policy

**Reading level** intermediate

**Kind of engagement** scholarly

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2008.04.005) 
10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2008.04.005

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

A conceptual critique of DSRP's distinctiveness: whether the systems-thinking rules offer anything beyond established good evaluation practice. Not an empirical study.

### What they found (results)

Rogers concludes that many implications of the four ideas have longstanding counterparts in evaluation practice, so naming them does not by itself establish a distinctive contribution. What might be distinctive lies in their systematic combination, and in the changes that combination produces in how an evaluation is conceived and conducted.

## Commentary

### In short

A serious discriminant-validity challenge, and not a rejection. Rogers accepts that the four ideas are relevant to evaluation; her question is whether they are uniquely systems thinking or simply what good evaluators already do. She suggests the added value may come from using the four together — which shifts the test from whether D, S, R and P are useful to whether their integrated use produces something measurably different from ordinary good evaluation.

### In more detail

Rogers sets the four core ideas against existing evaluation concepts and practices. Evaluators already deal with boundaries, program components, causal relationships, stakeholders, perspectives and context — which creates a classification problem: when an evaluator does these things, what makes the work specifically systems thinking?

She accepts that focusing on the four can strengthen evaluation, particularly by surfacing relationships and contextual influences that content-only approaches miss. But she resists treating familiar good practice as novel because it has been redescribed systemically. The stronger proposition is combinatorial: using the four explicitly and together may produce a more transformative way of framing an evaluation.

### Response

Rogers asks whether the four ideas are distinctively systems thinking or established good evaluation practice under new names. The theory's claim is that the four are complete and used together — a claim about structure rather than novelty.

**Patterns it shows** D, S, R, P

**How to cite this** Rogers P (2008). Is It Systems Thinking or Just Good Practice in Evaluation?. Evaluation and Program Planning 31(3):325-326.