Stitches, patterns and woven fabric: an analogy for meeting the challenge of explaining how realist evaluation elements come together

Background: Parenting is an activity central not only to the functioning of families, but also whole communities. Parenting and family support programmes are typically multi-component and thereby socially complex systems,... [ view full abstract ]

Background: Parenting is an activity central not only to the functioning of families, but also whole communities. Parenting and family support programmes are typically multi-component and thereby socially complex systems, involving human occupants who possess the power to behave unpredictably. This complexity means they are difficult to assess using traditional scientific methods and they require a realist evaluation approach that will accommodate the programme layers and embedded emergent powers. However, programme stakeholders or research students unfamiliar with realist principles can find this approach to evaluation confusing. The challenge is to find ways of communicating and explaining the meaning of contexts, mechanisms and outcomes and how they build and fit together as configurations. This is necessary to encourage commissions for evaluations that can explain programme elements and the often invisible details that impact on the nature of outcomes.

Aim: In this paper two parenting and family support evaluations studies are used as exemplars to illustrate how the application of realist evaluation principles can be explained through the analogy of woven fabric, made up of stitches and patterns.

Methods: Each of the studies incorporated qualitative data collection methods, including: participant observation and individual and group interviews. In each study, data were coded and thematically analysed. The first exemplar offers evidence of parents’ experiences whilst using services, from an evaluation involving 18 purposively selected individual and collective case studies. In contrast, the second exemplar illustrates service provider experiences and draws on an evaluation of a single children and families partnership team working across health and local authority provider organisations.

Findings: The exemplars show how the realist evaluation framework can support an evaluative exercise that goes beyond the obvious inputs and outputs of a social intervention to uncover elements that are tremendously meaningful to participants but often invisible to outsiders. An example included evidence of proactive action (mechanisms) taken by practitioners during and outside of formalised parenting course or staff training sessions (contexts) that were considered by recipients, to have meaningful consequences (outcomes).

Conclusion: The process of explaining the data as contexts, mechanisms and outcomes and displaying how they fit together offers an opportunity to create a visual of the many elements of the programme, or system of service provision, and how they interact. This is likened to the analogy of woven fabric that contains different stiches that in sequence create patterns that join to produce a whole garment.