Towards Better Theory for Community Level Interventions

Our work seeks to move beyond theories about people and their motivations and attitudes, although that is always important, to understand how particular environments and contexts influence people’s experience and well being.

We are also interested in change processes and how they occur. How do schools become more socially inclusive? How do effective programs get institutionalized, or sustained in practice? What is the dynamic that explains this?

Better theory about these processes may help in the design of more effective interventions.

Complexity theory offers a way of thinking that has pointed us in particular new directions. We are also examining more foundational theories in health such as ecological systems thinking.

Feature publications:

Hawe P, Shiell A, Riley T. Theorising interventions as events in systems. American Journal of Community Psychology 2009;43(3-4):267-276

Rickles D, Hawe P. Shiell A. A Simple guide to chaos and complexity. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 2007;61(11):933-7.

Hawe P, Riley T. Ecological theory in practice: illustrations from a community-based intervention to promote the health of recent mothers. Prevention Science 2005;6(5):227-236.

Hawe P, Shiell A, Riley T. Complex interventions: how far ‘out of control’ should a randomised controlled trial be? British Medical Journal 2004;328:1561-1563.

The December 2009 issue of New Directions in Evaluation co-edited by Judith Ottoson and Penny Hawe features the work of current and former graduate students on the origins, similarities and differences between knowledge transfer, diffusion, knowledge utilization, implementation and knowledge translation.