4.7.3 Holistic approach
Chen argues that a holistic approach to evaluation – by which he means that it is as important to focus on how a project or programme achieves its goals as it is on what the outcome was – is a characteristic that distinguishes programme evaluation from other fields of evaluation. Hence ‘The holistic approach to assessment finds it imperative to include contextual or transformation information when assessing the merit of a program’ (Chen, 2005, p. 9). The view taken here will be that this claim is not limited to programme evaluation, but fully encompasses technology assessment and evaluation on whatever scale and level.