Why bother searching for unintended effects in social programs?

I had this funny encounter with a researcher from a prestigious institution that advocates the use of experimental approach in evaluating social programs.  Using their argument that social programs are like medicines whose impacts have to be evaluated using the best possible research design, I asked for the place of unintended effects within the framework of experimentation.   Yup, it is not only drugs that have intended and unintended effects but also social programs.   For example, research studies on pay for performance policies have consistently found out that these policies result to perverse unexpected behaviors such as narrowly focusing on what are being measured and the gaming of performance metrics.

The answer given was to specify that unintended outcome beforehand and measure it before and after the experimentation.  This answer fits perfectly to the description of Thomas Kuhn on ‘normal science’.  Within prevailing paradigm, the typical response when encountered with something outside of that paradigm is to fit it within its boundaries; to determine the program’s unintended effects is to anticipate it as an intended effect.  You don’t find unintended effects by making conjectures – that is what intended effects for.  You find them by discovery and keen perception.  

Benefits of learning unintended effects
It is important that every monitoring and evaluation plan should include strategy for capturing the program’s unintended effects, positive or negative. In medicine, many of the drugs that we use were discovered because of their unintended effects.  For example, do you know that the original objective of Viagra was to treat heart problem?  And skin whitening is actually a side-effect of glutathione.  How about the interesting story of Thalidomine which was intended to be an antibiotic? This drug was shelved due to its harmful side-effects to pregnant women only to be revived few months later because of its anti-cancer properties.

In program evaluation, it might be possible that even though the program was successful in achieving its goals and targets, it might have triggered undesirable behaviors that off-set what otherwise would have been exemplary program performance.  Conversely, there might be unintended effects that are desirable and worthwhile to replicate through the introduction of similar social program.  Also, learning more about unintended effects of program allows one to understand the causal mechanisms working within the context.  These causal mechanisms sometimes work for or against the program goals.  I remember an example given by an African classmate of a day care center constructed on top of a burial site regarded as sacred by community members.   Because of cultural belief on the dead (the causal mechanism), nobody wants to go inside the building and the day care didn’t produce the intended result. Rather, its construction ignited animosity between the local community and central government.  

In search for a method
How do you evaluate unintended effects? Leading evaluation theorist, Michael Scriven, proposes the use of Goal-Free Evaluation.  As to what this is, that is an interesting material for another blog.