Abstract
BackgroundExperimental designs for evaluating knowledge translation (KT) interventions for professional behavior change can provide strong estimates of intervention effectiveness but offer limited insight how the intervention worked or not. Furthermore, trials provide little insight into the ways through which interventions lead to behavior change and how they are moderated by different facilitators and barriers. As a result, the ability to generalize the findings from one study to a different context, organization, or clinical problem is severely compromised. Consequently, researchers have started to explore the causal mechanisms in complementary studies (process evaluations) alongside experimental designs for evaluating KT interventions. This study focuses on improving process evaluations by synthesizing current evidence on process evaluations conducted alongside experimental designs for evaluating KT interventions.Methods/DesignA medical research librarian will develop and implement search strategies designed to identify evidence that is relevant to process evaluations in health research. Studies will not be excluded based on design. Included studies must contain a process evaluation component aimed at understanding or evaluating a KT intervention targeting professional behavior change. Two reviewers will perform study selection, quality assessment, and data extraction using standard forms. Disagreements will be resolved through discussion or third party adjudication. Data to be collected include study design, details about data collection approaches and types, theoretical influences, approaches to evaluate intervention dose delivered, intervention dose received, intervention fidelity, intervention reach, data analysis, and study outcomes. This study is not registered with PROSPERO.DiscussionThere is widespread acceptance that the generalizability of quantitative trials of KT interventions would be significantly enhanced to other contexts, health professional groups, and clinical conditions through complementary process evaluations alongside trials. This systematic review will serve as a ‘state of the science’ on methodological approaches to process evaluations and will allow us to: 1) take stock of current research approaches and 2) develop concrete recommendations for knowledge users (e.g., quality consultants and health services researchers) designing future KT process evaluations.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/2046-4053-3-149) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Experimental designs for evaluating knowledge translation (KT) interventions for professional behavior change can provide strong estimates of intervention effectiveness but offer limited insight how the intervention worked or not
There is widespread acceptance that the generalizability of quantitative trials of KT interventions would be significantly enhanced to other contexts, health professional groups, and clinical conditions through complementary process evaluations alongside trials
This systematic review will serve as a ‘state of the science’ on methodological approaches to process evaluations and will allow us to: 1) take stock of current research approaches and 2) develop concrete recommendations for knowledge users designing future KT process evaluations
Summary
Experimental designs for evaluating knowledge translation (KT) interventions for professional behavior change can provide strong estimates of intervention effectiveness but offer limited insight how the intervention worked or not. There have been no standards or guidance, specific to knowledge translation interventions, to guide the explicit design (e.g., research design, data collection types, and time points for examples) of these complementary yet vitally important process evaluations This lack of standardization has hindered the generalizability of this research while simultaneously making cross-study comparisons problematic and designing process evaluations in KT research even more challenging. The aim of this project is to synthesize the evidence on extant process evaluations conducted alongside experimental designs for evaluating KT interventions to make recommendations for multiple end-user groups. This knowledge is critically important as health care providers, health quality consultants, decision and policy makers, NGOs, governmental departments, partnerships, and health services researchers have a responsibility to evaluate the effectiveness of their KT efforts to ensure that scarce health care resources are effectively utilized as well as ensure enhanced generalizability of their knowledge to benefit others around the globe
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