Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-2-2020
Abstract
As a boy, Charles Marlow, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is drawn to explore “blank space of delightful mystery” on the map of Africa. By the time he’s old enough to take on the adventure, the blank space now has river names on it, and he’s charmed by the uncoiled snake of a river that promises an easy path into what has become “a place of darkness.” As young investigators, we typically begin with a desire to map, and perhaps to conquer, blank spaces of delightful mystery. We steam boldly up the mighty waterways of well-traveled theory and methods that take us toward the heart of darkness. If we’re adventurous, we ignore our advisors’ advice and trundle up a tributary. But mostly, we stick to the main channels. We colonize without understanding. Through our colonization, we see the barriers to our dominance, while our theories and methods leave us blind to the motivating delights that await understanding in the murky context. For more than two decades, the RE-AIM framework (1) has been a bonfire in the decontextualized darkness of health improvement interventions for which rigor is defined by the tenets of internal validity. By providing a framework for also paying attention to external validity, RE-AIM offers a lens for refracting and widening the laser focus of reductionist research to shine light on the multilevel factors that influence health and health care. Its extension to PRISM (2, 3) provides the methods and framework for assessing additional contextual factors essential for researchers who want to illuminate the real world impact of health interventions. Recent applications that use RE-AIM iteratively go even further in trying to make implementation science more rapid and relevant (to stakeholders), and aligned with recognition that context is dynamic, and our models, evaluations and interventions need to evolve as contextualized understanding advances (4).
Keywords
evaluation, evidence-based, interventions, program planning, RE-AIM framework
Language
English
Publication Title
Frontiers in Public Health
Rights
© 2020 Stange. This is an Open Access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Stange KC (2020) Commentary: RE-AIM Planning and Evaluation Framework: Adapting to New Science and Practice With a 20-Year Review. Front. Public Health 8:245. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2020.00245
Manuscript Version
Final Publisher Version