the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health engaged 500 stakeholders from the occupational safety and health community to help define a national occupational
research agenda (NORA) to improve worker safety and health.1,2 Twenty-one priority research areaswere identified, of which intervention effectiveness research was one.
The overarching goal of intervention effectiveness research is to demonstrate
the impact of interventions to prevent work injury and illness. Conducting
scientifically rigorous intervention effectiveness research is
challenging because of the varied scope and complexity of interventions
and the complicated, changing, real-world conditions potentially affecting
interventions and their outcomes.Public funds for such research
have been relatively scarce. Widespread recognition of this situation,
and the increasing pressure to justify and improve safety and health
investments, helped influence the selection of intervention effectiveness
research as one of the NORA priority areas. This article presents a framework
for understanding the process of intervention research in occupational
safety and health. It is based on work done by the NORA Intervention
Effectiveness Research Implementation Team, which is composed
of persons drawn from the broad occupational safety and healthcommunity, including labor, industry,academia, and government. An Overview of the Intervention Research
Process The team believes that intervention effectiveness studies must be
considered within the context of the broader intervention research field.
Research studies that inform intervention development, and studies
that evaluate whether the intervention was implemented as planned,
complement effectiveness studies. The relationships between three
broad intervention research phases (development, implementation, and
evaluation) are presented in Fig. 1 as the core of the NORA Intervention
Effectiveness Research team’s intervention research framework.