Thanks Patricia. 

Is the implication that you don’t think it’s all that helpful to try to engage policy makers to think about mechanism??

Cheers

Gill

From: Patricia Rogers [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, 30 January 2014 8:25 AM
To: Realist and Meta-narrative Evidence Synthesis: Evolving Standards; Gill Westhorp
Subject: Re: Advice on testing theories - and how programs work.

I think it's very helpful to think about ways in which program activities might trigger an Intended mechanism in an already favorable context by providing additional resources that are then able to be applied.

You could put this under the umbrella of context, since it's going from a low resource context to a higher resource context, but i don't find this a helpful way to frame it.  I think it's more useful for policymakers, practitioners and researchers to think hard about actions that might be taken to add resources, or change the context or both.

I'll be interested to hear others' ideas and experiences .

Patricia Rogers


> 2014-01-29 Gill Westhorp <[log in to unmask]>
>
> Hi all
>
> My turn to ask a question, in response to Geoff’s (as always, helpful) response below.  Geoff and I have had this conversation before but I’m curious as to what others think.  The question is: Do programs always and only work by changing the context and thereby changing the balance of mechanisms that fire?
>
>  
>
> It’s relatively straightforward in incentives-based programs to say ‘The new incentive changes the context in that it enables a proportion of the population who were already inclined to do x to now do x’ (or in the case of negative incentives such as increased costs or sanctions, ‘changes the weight of factors against the behaviour such that it increases the proportion of the population who decide against the behaviour’).
>
>  
>
> But what about therapeutic services?  One can of course argue that the context is different than it would be if no therapeutic service were available, but one can also argue that that is not what causes or enables the program to work.  The program works not by changing ‘the balance of existing mechanisms that fire’ but (arguably) by creating new mechanisms (new reasoning, new emotional states, new responses to existing contexts) within the client.
>
>  
>
> If one accepts the premise that such programs do not work by ‘changing the context and the balance of existing mechanisms that fire’, education programs are an even messier example, because they usually involve changing both the context and the ‘reasoning’ of the participants...

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Professor of Public Sector Evaluation
Centre for Applied Social Research

RMIT University, Australia

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