What evidence would justify a change of course?

Research question

Program assumptions describe why an intervention is expected to work. Recording conditions that would call those assumptions into question can make subsequent adaptation more transparent.

Source and findings

FRAME includes the timing and reasons for modifications and whether changes were planned or reactive. Wiltsey Stirman, Baumann & Miller (2019), FRAME

Interpretation

Explicit assumptions make a change of course easier to assess. Prospective decision criteria should still allow justified adaptation to changing circumstances.

Prospective reasoning and adaptation

A decision record can distinguish the original assumption, the evidence that challenged it and the response chosen. For an outreach intervention, this might concern whether the scheduled hours are accessible to intended participants. Changing hours could be justified by local feedback, but subsequent observation would still be needed to understand who attended and whether access improved. This is an illustrative example.

The analytical advantage is temporal clarity. Reviewers can examine what was known when the decision was made rather than judge the decision solely by its eventual result. Prospective criteria should not become inflexible rules: external shocks and unforeseen harms may require changes outside the original plan. Such departures are more interpretable when their rationale and uncertainty remain explicit.

Limits of the evidence

The framework structures documentation; it does not prescribe a universally correct threshold for changing an intervention.