Hi Melanie,
Didn’t we meet at the Liverpool CARES conference? Think we might have been on the same table at dinner…
Anyroad, if you do a search back through the RAMESES JSCMAIL archives, you will find a range of answers to your questions.
In my head, CMOs are a useful memory aid, or heuristic to ensure that I remember to include each element in the programme theory – context, mechanism and outcome. So in that sense, CMOs are what is used to develop
and consider programme theory.
I’d agree they are a specific way to
express a programme theory too, but could you explain how to unpack programme theory into CMOs, and then how that would be used as the analytical framework for testing programme theory…? I am intrigued and keen to understand
J
Best wishes
Becky
From: Realist and Meta-narrative Evidence Synthesis: Evolving Standards [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Melanie Punton
Sent: 14 December 2016 12:25
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: CMOs and programme theory
Hi all,
I’ve been wondering for a while about the relationship between ‘programme theory’ and ‘CMO’ – there seem to be subtly different ways of talking about this.
Starting from the definition of ‘programme theory’ offered in the RAMESES II standards: “One of its functions is to describe and explain (some of) how and why, in the ‘real world’, a programme ‘works’, for whom, to what extent and in
which contexts.”
Do CMOs underpin a programme theory? Programme theory is higher level and more abstract, and CMOs are more granular, less abstract hypotheses that act as ‘building blocks’ in support of it? Or perhaps CMOs ‘zoom in’ on various aspects
of a programme theory and explain them in more detail? The implication of this seems to be that programme theory is more abstract, higher level and/or less detailed than CMOs.
Or are CMOs a specific way to describe/ analyse a programme theory? Programme theory is unpacked into CMOs, which act as the analytical framework for testing the programme theory? The implication of this seems to be that programme
theory is just a combination of all the CMOs developed and tested in the study.
Or is it something else?
Would be great to hear others’ thoughts or musings on this!
Mel
Melanie Punton
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