He is Professor in the Department of Public Health and Director of the Center for Evaluation and Applied Research at Mercer University.
[9] The approach was developed in response to "black-box" evaluation, which tended to focus on research methods rather than attempting to understand the mechanisms through which a program might work.
Key reasons for this include learning from null results and to improve the implementation of successful programs.
It advances evaluation practice very little to adopt one or another of current global theories in attacking, say, the problem of juvenile delinquency, but it does help a great deal to understand the authority structure in schools and the mechanisms of peer group influence and parental discipline in designing and evaluating a program that is supposed to reduce disciplinary problems in schools.
[13] However, Chen has also made case for the importance of qualitative methods, particularly when developing program theories.