Making and justifying evidence claims: evidence synthesis of impact evaluations and systematic reviews in international development (original) (raw)

What have we learned from the application of systematic review methodology in international development? – a thematic overview

The importance of systematic review evidence in the design and implementation of policies and interventions is increasingly recognised in the field of international development. This article presents a stocktake of the primary years of systematic reviewing in international development, providing a thematic overview of what we have learned about conducting international development reviews. Applying a structured methodology to search for and categorise all relevant literature, it establishes that systematic reviews have been well received in international development and serve as a useful tool for evidenceinformed development, which has led to important discoveries in the domain

Causal chain analysis in systematic reviews of international development interventions

Understanding the extent to which an intervention ‘works’ can provide compelling evidence to decision-makers, although without an accompanying explanation of how an intervention works, this evidence can be difficult to apply in other settings, ultimately impeding its usefulness in making judicious and evidence-informed decisions. In this paper, we describe causal chain analysis as involving the development of a logic model, which outlines graphically a hypothesis of how an intervention leads to a change in an outcome. This logic model is then used to anchor subsequent decisions in the systematic review process, including decisions on synthesis. In this paper, we outline the steps taken in building a logic model, which usually consists of a series of boxes depicting intervention components and processes, outputs, and outcomes with arrows depicting connecting relationships. The nature of these connecting relationships and their basis in causality are considered, through a focus on com...