Impact Data Review Group

1. Challenge and Focus:

a. Social change and behaviour change are often characterized as not having hard, compelling evidence that demonstrates their direct impact on priority development issues.

b. Two groups from whom we often hear this critique are national and international policy makers and funders.

c. This often disrupts the possibility for people in our common field of work being significantly engaged in local, national or international planning and policy development and/or securing the resources required to work at the scale required. 
    
2. Purpose:  

To provide national and international policy makers and funder decision-makers with the compelling evidence they need, in the easily digestible bite sized chunks they require, to demonstrate that social change and behaviour change strategies and actions have a significant, positive direct impact on priority development challenges.

3. Work to date:

We have taken the following steps:

a. A journal literature identification process.

a. Asking (and receiving from) research focused people and organisations in the social change and behaviour change field of work to nominate up to 10 pieces of research that they find most compelling and persuasive in demonstrating the direct impact of social change and behaviour change strategies related to development priorities.

c. A review of the collection of impact research summaries on The CI platform - see this link

d. From those three steps we identified 95 studies that meet the criteria that follow.

e. Then we distilled those studies into their key points.

4. Criteria:

The selection criteria for identifying the social change and behaviour change research and impact data set a very high bar in order to help ensure credibility with policy makers and funders.

a. Only Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) with a researched population over 1,500 ... or ...

b. ... Systematic reviews that include some RCTs

c. Must be published in a peer review published journal

d. Primarily that publishing should be in the leading journals that have the highest credibility amongst funders and policy decision-makers

e. The research must produce a sentence or phrase that contains a numeric, direct impact data point that can be quoted.

Why these criteria? They attempt to meet head on the critiques we often hear - for example that the social change and behaviour change research date is regarded as "soft".

5. The Review Process

The review process to which we are inviting you to contribute if interested and available involves spending one to two hours later this week or early next week, at a time suitable to you, through the following:

a. Review these two pages

Impact Data by ISSUE (examples)