The power of the context map: Designing realistic outcome evaluation strategies and other unanticipated benefits

Dealing with context in logic model development: Reflections from a realist evaluation of a community health worker programme in Nigeria

“…Logic models are tools for planning, describing, managing, communicating, and evaluating a programme or intervention (CDC, 2013; Millar, Simeone, & Carnevale, 2001; Naimoli, Frymus, Wuliji, Franco, & Newsome, 2014). The LM offers a simplified visual representation of the relationship between various components of a programme (Kaplan & Garette, 2005; Renger et al, 2015), and may include assumptions that underlie expectations that the programme will work under certain environmental conditions to solve a particular social problem (Knowlton & Phillips, 2012; McLaughlin & Jordan, 2015). Logic models vary in their complexity and take many different forms, including flowcharts, tables, pictures, and diagrams, and can include different components (Funnell & Rogers, 2011; Newton, Poon, Nunes, & Stone, 2013; Petersen, Taylor, & Peikes, 2013).…”

“…Moreover, scholars have highlighted an unintended consequence of some simple formats of LMs. For example, Morell (2014) and Renger et al (2015) noted that the limitation of the table-format of LM is that it only depicts the subset of contextual conditions directly targeted by a programme while ignoring the broader context of the other underlying conditions that contributed to the problem the programme aimed to change. Rogers (2008) argues that, by leaving out the other factors that contribute to observed outcomes, including the implementation context, concurrent programmes and the characteristics of clients, simple logic models risk overstating the causal contribution of the intervention, and providing less useful information for replication.…”

“…‘theories’) that inform the making of a programme, followed by an empirical investigation to gauge the extent to which those theories are met within complex contextual circumstances of implementation practices (Manzano & Pawson, 2014). Theory-driven evaluators use several methods with varied levels of detail and complexity for eliciting, “constructing or reconstructing” programme theory, including logic modelling, logical frameworks, outcomes hierarchies and Antecedent Target Measurement (Astbury & Leeuw, 2010; Blamey & Mackenzie, 2007; Renger, Foltysova, Becker, & Souvannasacd, 2015; Rogers, 2008).…”

“…Nevertheless, current debates in the LM literature criticise scholars for overlooking the role of context in logic model design, construction and usage (Morell, 2014; Renger et al, 2015) This article contributes to addressing this shortcoming by: i) reflecting on how theory-driven evaluation approaches account for context during LM development; and ii) presenting how we explored context during LM development for realist evaluation of a community health workers’ (CHW1) programme in Nigeria.…”

Evaluación de intervenciones sociales basadas en el turismo usando el enfoque metodológico de la Evaluación Realista

“…En este sentido, el enfoque realista respecto a la evaluación de (Pawson and Tilley, 2010) que tiene sus raíces en la teoría del cambio (Weiss, 1995) y en la evaluación basada en las teorías (Lipsey, 1993;Chen, 2005;Renger et al, 2015), se presenta como una opción para sacar a la luz lo que contiene la caja negra de la evaluación 2 , y con ello explicar los procesos de cambio provocados por la intervención. Este enfoque metodológico tiene el potencial de generar conocimiento valioso que puede contribuir al debate bien informado para ayudar a la toma de decisiones.…”