Yes, but ToC don’t improve impact in isolation (you can imagine a perfectly good ToC for an intervention which doesn’t do much). Also, if you draw a nice diagram, but it doesn’t actually inform any of your decisions or change your behavior in any way, then it hasn’t really done anything. A ToC is ideally combined with cost-benefit analyses, the comparing of multiple avenues of action, etc and it should pay you back in the form of generating some concrete, informative actions e.g. consulting stakeholders to check your research questions, generally creating checkpoints at which you are trying to get measurements and indicators and opinions from relevant people.
For more foundational and theoretical questions where the direct impact isn’t obvious, there may be a higher risk of drawing a diagram which doesn’t do anything. I think there’s ways to avoid this—understand the relevance of your research to other (ideally more practical) researchers who you’ve spoken to about it such as a peer review process, make a conceptual map of where your work fits in to other ideas which then lead to impact, try to get as close to the practical level as you realistically can. If it’s reallyhard to tie it to the practical level it is sometimes a sign that you might need to re-evaluate the activity.
Do they
Back in academia, I didn’t even know what a “theory of change” was, so I think not. But, one is frequently asked to state the practical and the theoretical value of your research, and the peer review and grant writing process implicitly incorporates elements of stakeholder relevance. However,as an academic, if you fail to make your own analyses, separately from this larger infrastructure, you may end up following institutional priorities (of grant makers, of academic journals, etc) which differ from “doing the most good” as you conceptualize it.
A forum resource on ToC in research which I found insightful: Are you working on a research agenda? A guide to increasing the impact of your research by involving decision-makers
Yes, but ToC don’t improve impact in isolation (you can imagine a perfectly good ToC for an intervention which doesn’t do much). Also, if you draw a nice diagram, but it doesn’t actually inform any of your decisions or change your behavior in any way, then it hasn’t really done anything. A ToC is ideally combined with cost-benefit analyses, the comparing of multiple avenues of action, etc and it should pay you back in the form of generating some concrete, informative actions e.g. consulting stakeholders to check your research questions, generally creating checkpoints at which you are trying to get measurements and indicators and opinions from relevant people.
For more foundational and theoretical questions where the direct impact isn’t obvious, there may be a higher risk of drawing a diagram which doesn’t do anything. I think there’s ways to avoid this—understand the relevance of your research to other (ideally more practical) researchers who you’ve spoken to about it such as a peer review process, make a conceptual map of where your work fits in to other ideas which then lead to impact, try to get as close to the practical level as you realistically can. If it’s really hard to tie it to the practical level it is sometimes a sign that you might need to re-evaluate the activity.
Back in academia, I didn’t even know what a “theory of change” was, so I think not. But, one is frequently asked to state the practical and the theoretical value of your research, and the peer review and grant writing process implicitly incorporates elements of stakeholder relevance. However, as an academic, if you fail to make your own analyses, separately from this larger infrastructure, you may end up following institutional priorities (of grant makers, of academic journals, etc) which differ from “doing the most good” as you conceptualize it.