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Move from strategy lists to causal explanations

Implementation science has many resources for naming strategies, identifying determinants, and measuring outcomes. StrategyLink helps connect those pieces.

Rather than presenting implementation strategies as a list, StrategyLink organizes what is known and theorized about how strategies work. It is designed to help researchers make the causal logic of implementation strategies more explicit, testable, and useful for study design, grant writing, strategy selection, and evaluation.

Search by determinant to identify implementation strategies that may be relevant to the barrier or facilitator you are trying to address.

Search by implementation strategy to explore the mechanisms, determinants, moderators, and outcomes linked to that strategy.

Use StrategyLink to examine how strategies may activate mechanisms, address implementation challenges, and contribute to proximal, intermediate, and distal implementation outcomes.

Explore moderators or preconditions of an implementation strategy to identify contextual factors that may influence whether, when, or how strongly it produces its intended effects.

Search by outcome to explore which strategies and causal pathways may be relevant to adoption, fidelity, penetration, sustainment, or other implementation outcomes.

Explore the knowledge base at multiple levels

StrategyLink is organized around projects, studies, and models.

Projects are larger bodies of work, such as funded grants or research programs.
Studies are specific investigations or publications. Some studies are part of a larger project, while others stand alone.
Models are causal representations of how implementation strategies are expected or observed to work.

You can explore StrategyLink at the level that best fits your question: start with a project to understand the broader research context, a study to examine a specific source of evidence or theory, or a model to explore a causal pathway in detail. 

StrategyLink is not just another list of implementation strategies.

It is a causal knowledge base that helps researchers understand why a strategy may work, how it may produce change, and under what conditions it may be more or less effective.

StrategyLink brings together two types of knowledge:

Causal theories

StrategyLink includes causal theories of how distinct implementation strategies are expected to work. These theories describe the strategy’s core actions, the determinants it may address, the mechanisms it may activate, the outcomes it may influence, and the contextual factors that may shape its effects.

Emerging empirical evidence

StrategyLink also includes empirical models from published studies that test implementation strategies. These models help users examine how strategies have been studied and where evidence exists for specific strategy-mechanism-outcome relationships.

Together, these theory and evidence layers help implementation scientists generate hypotheses, strengthen conceptual models, select strategies more intentionally, and design more informative implementation studies.

Built from causal pathway diagramming

StrategyLink is informed by causal pathway diagramming, a method for making explicit how an implementation strategy is expected to produce change.

https://impscimethods.org/index.php/toolkits/causal-pathway-diagrams-toolkit

Causal pathway diagrams help clarify:

  • What the strategy does
  • What determinant the strategy is intended to address
  • What mechanism explains how the strategy works
  • What proximal and distal outcomes should change if the strategy is working
  • What preconditions or moderators may influence whether the strategy works

The shapes, categories, and relationships in StrategyLink reflect this causal pathway logic. This allows users to move beyond naming strategies and toward specifying the causal processes that make strategies more likely to succeed.