TY - JOUR

T1 - Capturing complexity in the evaluation of a major area-based initiative in community empowerment

T2 - what can a multi-site, multi team, ethnographic approach offer?

AU - Orton, L.

AU - Ponsford, R.

AU - Egan, M.

AU - Halliday, E.

AU - Whitehead, M.

AU - Popay, J.

N1 - This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Anthropology and Medicine on 26/06/2019, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13648470.2018.1508639

PY - 2019/7/1

Y1 - 2019/7/1

N2 - In recent years, there has been growing emphasis on the need to develop ways of capturing ‘complexity’ in the evaluation of health initiatives in order to produce better evidence about ‘how’ and under what conditions such interventions work. Used alone, conventional methods of evaluation that attempt to reduce intervention processes and outcomes to a small number of discrete and finite variables, are typically not well suited to this task. Among the research community there have been increasing calls to take more seriously qualitative methods as an alternative or complementary approach to intervention evaluation. Ethnography has been identified as being particularly well suited to the purpose of capturing the full messiness that ensues when health interventions are introduced into complex settings (or systems). In this paper we reflect on our experience of taking a long term multi-site, multi team, ethnographic approach to capture complex, dynamic system processes in the first phase of an evaluation of a major area-based community empowerment initiative being rolled out in 150 neighbourhoods in England. We consider the utility of our approach for capturing the complexity inherent to understanding the changes that ensue when the initiative is delivered into multiple diverse contexts/systems as well as the opportunities and challenges that emerge in the research process.

AB - In recent years, there has been growing emphasis on the need to develop ways of capturing ‘complexity’ in the evaluation of health initiatives in order to produce better evidence about ‘how’ and under what conditions such interventions work. Used alone, conventional methods of evaluation that attempt to reduce intervention processes and outcomes to a small number of discrete and finite variables, are typically not well suited to this task. Among the research community there have been increasing calls to take more seriously qualitative methods as an alternative or complementary approach to intervention evaluation. Ethnography has been identified as being particularly well suited to the purpose of capturing the full messiness that ensues when health interventions are introduced into complex settings (or systems). In this paper we reflect on our experience of taking a long term multi-site, multi team, ethnographic approach to capture complex, dynamic system processes in the first phase of an evaluation of a major area-based community empowerment initiative being rolled out in 150 neighbourhoods in England. We consider the utility of our approach for capturing the complexity inherent to understanding the changes that ensue when the initiative is delivered into multiple diverse contexts/systems as well as the opportunities and challenges that emerge in the research process.

KW - area-based initiative

KW - Community empowerment

KW - complexity

KW - Ethnography

KW - evaluation

KW - multi-site

KW - multi-team

KW - article

KW - empowerment

KW - England

KW - ethnography

KW - neighborhood

U2 - 10.1080/13648470.2018.1508639

DO - 10.1080/13648470.2018.1508639

M3 - Journal article

VL - 26

SP - 48

EP - 64

JO - Anthropology and Medicine

JF - Anthropology and Medicine

SN - 1364-8470

IS - 1

ER -