Implementation Science: Measures, Metric and Methods

3 units

This course will address key methodological approaches in implementation science, focusing on methods with particular or distinctive relevance to implementation research. The course begins with an introduction to concepts of causality and tools for rendering causal relationships, and suggests that these tools are useful for scientific insights into context, adaptation, heterogeneity, external validity and other issues salient in implementation research. We will cover how to capture and represent strategies, the concept of implementation outcomes and how they can be measured. The course will cover methods relevant for approaches at the organizational, practice, or regional level, based on cluster-level considerations about sampling, measurement and analysis. Subsequently, we will apply a causal lens to examine some prominent issues in measurement - including concepts such as sustainability, context and other concepts. Finally, the course will close a look at present methods of appraising research and rating evidence, such as GRADE and problematize these methods for implementation research, and suggest future directions.