Abstract
BackgroundDespite the increasing popularity of the theory of change (ToC) approach, little is known about the extent to which ToC has been used in the design and evaluation of public health interventions. This review aims to determine how ToCs have been developed and used in the development and evaluation of public health interventions globally.MethodsWe searched for papers reporting the use of “theory of change” in the development or evaluation of public health interventions in databases of peer-reviewed journal articles such as Scopus, Pubmed, PsychInfo, grey literature databases, Google and websites of development funders. We included papers of any date, language or study design. Both abstracts and full text papers were double screened. Data were extracted and narratively and quantitatively summarised.ResultsA total of 62 papers were included in the review. Forty-nine (79 %) described the development of ToC, 18 (29 %) described the use of ToC in the development of the intervention and 49 (79 %) described the use of ToC in the evaluation of the intervention. Although a large number of papers were included in the review, their descriptions of the ToC development and use in intervention design and evaluation lacked detail.ConclusionsThe use of the ToC approach is widespread in the public health literature. Clear reporting of the ToC process and outputs is important to strengthen the body of literature on practical application of ToC in order to develop our understanding of the benefits and advantages of using ToC. We also propose a checklist for reporting on the use of ToC to ensure transparent reporting and recommend that our checklist is used and refined by authors reporting the ToC approach.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13012-016-0422-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Despite the increasing popularity of the theory of change (ToC) approach, little is known about the extent to which ToC has been used in the design and evaluation of public health interventions
The majority were published in English in peerreviewed journals, but we included PhD theses, presentations and NGO reports from the grey literature
Four pairs of papers are reported on the same public health interventions [1, 13, 42, 43, 54, 60, 81, 82]
Summary
Despite the increasing popularity of the theory of change (ToC) approach, little is known about the extent to which ToC has been used in the design and evaluation of public health interventions. Most public health interventions are inherently complex, with multiple interacting components, delivered at multiple levels. This complexity makes them difficult to evaluate using traditional experimental designs. Public health interventions often rely on ongoing quality improvement based on the implementation experience. They may not reach the level of stability required to conduct evaluations such as randomised. We mean a set of organised activities or interventions supported by resources designed to achieve a specific result [6]. The theories are first made explicit and used to see how the programme theory results in the intended outcomes [4]
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