Theorising Interventions as Events in Systems

Abstract

Conventional thinking about preventive interventions focuses over simplistically on the "package" of activities and/or their educational messages. An alternative is to focus on the dynamic properties of the context into which the intervention is introduced. Schools, communities and worksites can be thought of as complex ecological systems. They can be theorised on three dimensions: (1) their constituent activity settings (e.g., clubs, festivals, assemblies, classrooms); (2) the social networks that connect the people and the settings; and (3) time. An intervention may then be seen as a critical event in the history of a system, leading to the evolution of new structures of interaction and new shared meanings. Interventions impact on evolving networks of person-time-place interaction, changing relationships, displacing existing activities and redistributing and transforming resources. This alternative view has significant implications for how interventions should be evaluated and how they could be made more effective. We explore this idea, drawing on social network analysis and complex systems theory.

Studying and Addressing Urban Immigrant Restaurant Worker Health and Safety in San Francisco’s Chinatown District: A CBPR Case Study

“…24 Community partnering is considered a critical component of a comprehensive, integrated framework for health promotion, 49 as approaches like CBPR focus on broader contexts and systems approaches for health promotion while emphasizing the effectiveness of interventions in real-world settings. [49][50][51] Although not without challenges, studies like the Chinatown Restaurant Worker Health and Safety Study in San Francisco hold promise for urban health research and research translation with the growing urban immigrant populations in the USA and globally.…”

A tool for exploring the dynamics of innovative interventions for public health: the critical event card

“…As proposed by Hawe et al (2009) critical events may be taken as events capable of bringing about changes in a system. As demonstrated in this study, critical episodes related to actors' interactions, mediation result in important modifications and learnings.…”

“…Controversies and critical events that indicate destabilization and subsequent stabilization episodes can be identified and interpreted revealing the dynamics within the ST-N. These situations emerge contextually and affect the evolution of the intervention (Hawe et al 2009;Bisset and Potvin 2007).…”

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