The SC-ImpRes (Social Care Implementation Research) guide
A practical guide to designing and conducting implementation research in social care
Social care
The SC-ImpRes (Social Care Implementation Research) guide is a new resource created by researchers at ARC South London. It provides a step-by-step approach to designing and conducting implementation research in social care. Implementation research explores, describes, explains and/or predicts implementation. It’s objective is to improve the adoption (take-up) of effective practices, with appropriate adaptation and modification if necessary.
The guide contains eight sections, each of which introduces key terms and concepts relevant to implementation research in social care and includes reflective questions and statements to consider when designing and conducting implementation research.
The guide aims to:
- Support social care researchers and practitioners to design and conduct research about implementation (rather than to do implementation) of social care programmes and interventions.
- Define commonly used implementation science terminology.
- Provide an overview of common practices and underlying concepts of implementation science that are relevant to the social care field.
- Signpost research teams to relevant literature and resources to support the design of implementation research in social care.
Who is this guide for?
- Social care researchers and practitioners designing and conducting implementation research (but not primarily performing implementation of a programme or intervention in practice).
- Social care researchers and practitioners with varying levels of expertise in implementation science (including beginner, intermediate and advanced levels).
Background
Social Care ImpRes belongs to the wider ImpRes family of resources (including the Implementation Science Research development (ImpRes) tool and guide (Hull et al., 2019), the Implementation Research Proposal Assessment Criteria (ImpResPAC) tool (Sweetnam et al., 2022) and the Implementation Science Research Glossary. Its development was informed by the original ImpRes tool and guide and by an Expert Advisory Group, consisting of 13 social care and implementation science experts.
View the SC-ImpRes interactive PDF.