Capturing Intangibles in Outcome Harvesting? How to Integrate Attitudes within a Behavior-Centered Approach

Outcome Harvesting (OH) practitioners have long struggled with the question of whether and how to address intangibles in an OH evaluation. This session draws upon the Guide to Outcome Harvesting + Attitude Change (OH+AC; updated May 2024) to demonstrate how to incorporate Attitude Change into OH while simultaneously honoring OH’s behavior-centric core principles. OH’s strict definition of an outcome as an observable Behavior Change supports rigor - but it also misses a great deal in situations where attitudes matter. Attitude Change data can be useful when an inner transformation is essential for achieving the outward behavior change that drives social change, or when evaluation participants hold attitudes as central to their worldviews. In those situations, what is an OH evaluator to do? OH+AC adds Attitude Change as a new component within the data set, without changing the behavior-centered definition of an outcome. In this session, we will provide a brief conceptual introduction and then draw on multi-cultural case studies from Boston and Egypt to demonstrate the two most essential distinctions of the OH+AC approach: how we collect data and how we analyze data. We will close with a lively plenary discussion and an invitation to help co-create the next phase of learning.