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Theorising Interventions as Events in Systems

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American Journal of Community Psychology

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.

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Acknowledgments

This paper has benefited from discussions with colleagues in the International Collaboration on Complex Interventions funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Penelope Hawe is the Markin Chair in Health and Society. Alan Shiell holds a CIHR Chair in the Economics of Population Health. Both are also Health Scientists funded by the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research. We are grateful to Ed Trickett and Jay Schensul for comments and critique that improved our thinking. We thank Trisha Greenhalgh for pointing us to the Orlikowski references.

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  1. Population Health Intervention Research Centre, University of Calgary, 3330 Hospital Drive NW, Calgary, AB, T2N 4N1, Canada

    Penelope Hawe & Alan Shiell

  2. Centre for Health and Society, School of Population Health, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Therese Riley

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  1. Penelope Hawe
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Correspondence to Penelope Hawe.

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Hawe, P., Shiell, A. & Riley, T. Theorising Interventions as Events in Systems. Am J Community Psychol 43, 267–276 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-009-9229-9

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