Exploring the intersection of hermeneutics and implementation: a scoping review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: An enduring challenge remains about how to effectively implement programs, services, or practices. Too often, implementation does not achieve its intended effectiveness, fidelity, and sustainability, even when frameworks or theories determine implementation strategies and actions. A different approach is needed. This scoping review joined two markedly different bodies of literature: implementation and hermeneutics. Implementation is usually depicted as focused, direct, and somewhat linear, while hermeneutics attends to the messiness of everyday experience and human interaction. Both, however, are concerned with practical solutions to real-life problems. The purpose of the scoping review was to summarize existing knowledge on how a hermeneutic approach has informed the process of implementing health programs, services, or practices. METHODS: We completed a scoping review by taking a Gadamerian hermeneutic approach to the JBI scoping review method. Following a pilot search, we searched eight health-related electronic databases using broadly stated terms such as implementation and hermeneutics. A diverse research team that included a patient and healthcare leader, working in pairs, independently screened titles/abstracts and full-text articles. Through the use of inclusion criteria and full-team dialogue, we selected the final articles and identified their characteristics, hermeneutic features, and implementation components. RESULTS: Electronic searches resulted in 2871 unique studies. After full-text screening, we retained six articles that addressed both hermeneutics and implementing a program, service, or practice. The studies varied widely in location, topic, implementation strategies, and hermeneutic approach. All addressed assumptions underpinning implementation, the human dimensions of implementing, power differentials, and knowledge creation during implementation. All studies addressed issues foundational to implementing such as cross-cultural communication and surfacing and addressing tensions during processes of change. The studies showed how creating conceptual knowledge was a precursor to concrete, instrumental knowledge for action and behavioral change. Finally, each study demonstrated how the hermeneutic process of the fusion of horizons created new understandings needed for implementation. CONCLUSIONS: Hermeneutics and implementation have rarely been combined. The studies reveal important features that can contribute to implementation success. Implementers and implementation research may benefit from understanding, articulating, and communicating hermeneutic approaches that foster the relational and contextual foundations necessary for successful implementation. TRIAL REGISTRATION: The protocol was registered at the Centre for Open Science on September 10, 2019. MacLeod M, Snadden D, McCaffrey G, Zimmer L, Wilson E, Graham I, et al. A hermeneutic approach to advancing implementation science: a scoping review protocol 2019. Accessed at osf.io/eac37.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.026 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".