I was interested to see a recent review of process tracing in health research (Johnson, Beach, & Al-Janabi, 2024). How are its users getting on…?
Of the 19 evaluations satisfying review criteria, only 2 got full marks:
- Alvarado, M., Penney, T. L., Unwin, N., Murphy, M. M., & Adams, J. (2021). Evidence of a health risk ‘signalling effect’ following the introduction of a sugar-sweetened beverage tax. Food Policy, 102.
- Ryu, S.-K., & Chung, S.-G. (2021). Korea’s Early COVID-19 Response: Findings and Implications. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(16), 8316.
These were praised for how they justified using process tracing, their complete and detailed description of methods, their use of multiple types of evidence, and how they considered and attempted to rule out alternative or counterfactual explanations of outcomes. Finally, they linked their findings back to the theory. I have added them to my reading stack.
The review’s conclusions are damning:
“… a majority of studies reported do not describe in-depth how they conduct their process trace, and fewer still support their claims consistently and comprehensively with verifiable and well organised evidence. This is somewhat counterintuitive given that one of the features of process tracing is to support the more robust depth of analysis to explore hypotheses and confirm or counter with supportive evidence. However, this is not just a feature of studies reporting process tracing in health. Applications of process tracing in policy studies and political science more generally have similar trends, with many studies providing little detail of their methodology or a mechanistic depiction of the theory.”
As ever, to be continued…
References
Alvarado, M., Penney, T. L., Unwin, N., Murphy, M. M., & Adams, J. (2021). Evidence of a health risk ‘signalling effect’ following the introduction of a sugar-sweetened beverage tax. Food Policy, 102.
Johnson, R., Beach, D., & Al-Janabi, H. (2024). How is process tracing applied in health research? A systematic scoping review. Social Science & Medicine, in press, journal pre-proof.
Ryu, S.-K., & Chung, S.-G. (2021). Korea’s Early COVID-19 Response: Findings and Implications. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(16), 8316.