Blending Participatory Action Synthesis and Meta-Ethnography: An Innovative Approach to Evaluating Complex Community Health Transformation

Abstract

Community health improvement processes are diverse and complex, and evaluation methods to gain generalizable knowledge across community settings are limited by available data, and the need for deep contextual knowledge. This article describes an innovative participatory approach to evaluation of a transformation initiative involving up to eighteen communities nationwide. The approach blends two qualitative research synthesis methods: participatory action synthesis and meta-ethnography and applies them to the pragmatic evaluation of a program in real-life settings. In this article, we present the justification for and details about the evaluation process. The approach presented here will be useful to both researchers and practitioners interested in evaluating community-based health and well-being initiatives and other complex interventions conducted in complex settings.