Designing Program and Interventions for Impact

Research over the past few decades has grown outstripping available public funding in many countries. This has led to discussions about how to get best value from research or interventions and a growing interest is the non-academic benefits or impact of research and interventions as Funders and Governments world-wide seek evidence of the value of research/ investments to society. As the global financial, economic, social, environmental, political, technological and health crises deepen and become complex, funders are increasingly eliciting for evaluations that demonstrate impact of their funding. As the value of programs/interventions is increasingly coming under scrutiny, researchers and implementers often find themselves confronted by the need to demonstrate impact. Evaluations on the other hand often lack the methodological robustness to inform further action of determining to what extent observed changes in the outcome are attributed to the intervention. This has led to what we term, the black box impact evaluation. We propose designing programs and interventions for impact from the outset by embedding impact thinking and impact indicators at design stage.

Our goal is to provide actionable frameworks or step by step guides to equip researchers and program managers to design their studies with impact in mind from the outset. To that end, we propose designing programs and interventions for impact. This entails embedding impact thinking in program/intervention design, involving beneficiaries as key stakeholders from problem identification, project inception design, implementation and evaluation, measuring the outcome of interest at baseline, midline, and endline utilizing both qualitative and quantitative data, designing a program theory of change at the outset, with clear context mechanism and outcome pathways and capturing both intended and unintended consequences of the intervention.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Clinical Trial
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

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Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Clinical Trial
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Registered Report
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review

Keywords: impact, beneficiaries as key stakeholders in design, monitoring, evaluation, Epidemiology, Research, impact evaluation, theory of change, evidence, triangulation, outcomes, mixed methods

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