Denise E. De Souza

• PhD; MC-Evaluation; GC-Evaluation; MEd (EL); PGDE (Sec); Hons. Psyc. (Soc. Sc.)
• Senior Research Fellow at Torrens University Australia (Melbourne Campus)

Pawson and Tilley’s acknowledgment of programs embedded in multiple social systems has gained little traction in realist synthesis and evaluation practice. A practice focusing on fairly closed systems—explaining how programs work and do not work—has emerged. This article negotiates the boundaries of knowledge pertinent to have in program design and...

Low employment rates of individuals with intellectual disabilities in Australia stem from apprehensions about their abilities to engage in work, and employers’ low confidence in hiring them in paid positions. Drawing on principles of evaluative reasoning, this paper reports on findings from a mixed-methods formative evaluation. It was conducted to...

This article aims to contribute to the methodological discussion initiated by Pawson and Manzano-Santaella (2012). It proposes a possible elaboration of the ‘trio of explanatory components’ (Pawson and Tilley, 1997: 77) used as a strategy in realist evaluation – the Context-Mechanism-Outcome configuration (CMOc). This temporarily diverts attention...

This article explains how the meta-theoretical framework of critical realism addresses methodological issues of concern to social psychologists and social scientists. The article outlines key tenets of critical realism – its notion of the stratified nature of reality and generative mechanisms as powers in natural and social objects that cause thing...

Introduction: Intergenerational cycles of poverty, violence and crime, poor education and employment opportunities, psychopathology, and poor lifestyle and health behaviours require innovative models of health care delivery to break them. We describe a programme of research informed service development targeting vulnerable families in inner metrop...

Abstract This paper focuses on post-secondary programmes for individuals with intellectual impairments within university settings in Chile, Ireland, and Australia. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is adopted to explain how programmes are developed and sustained through relationships between human and non-human actors. Findings show that for all the unive...

Background Research on post-secondary training for individuals with intellectual disabilities has generally focused on programs, with little consideration of the structures and mechanisms that give rise to them. This article adopts a critical realist perspective to comparatively analyse and theorise about the contextual structures contributing to t...

--Background--Research on post-secondary training for individuals with intellectual disabilities has generally focused on programs, with little consideration of the structures and mechanisms that give rise to them. This article adopts a critical realist perspective to comparatively analyse and theorise about the contextual structures contributing t...

The internationalisation of higher education has been challenged by the significant decline in international student mobility caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The emergence of internationalisation at a distance before COVID-19 paved a new avenue for the internationalisation of higher education, with the distinctive feature of knowledge mobility wit...

Realist evaluation has gained prominence in the field of evaluation in recent years. Its theory-driven approach to explaining how and why programmes work or not makes it attractive to many novices, early career researchers, and organizations implementing various programmes globally and relevant to policymakers and programme implementers. While real...

Introduction: The Healthy Homes and Neighbourhoods (HHAN) integrated care initiative was designed to break intergenerational cycles of social and health inequalities and enhance access to and engagement with health and social services for vulnerable families in the Sydney Local Health District. We sought to unearth the initial programme theory of t...

Issue addressed: To determine if Australian policies support a primary health care system to identify family adversity and subsequently support these families. Methods: Two methodological approaches were used: 1) a scoping review of Australian federal and two states (Victoria, NSW) policies related to family adversity (e.g., childhood maltreatme...

Introduction Community-integrated care initiatives are increasingly being used for social and health service delivery and show promising outcomes. Nevertheless, it is unclear what structures and underlining causal agents (generative mechanisms) are responsible for explaining how and why they work or not. Methods and analysis Critical realist synth...

Introduction Integrated community healthcare Hubs may offer a ‘one stop shop’ for service users with complex health and social needs, and more efficiently use service resources. Various policy imperatives exist to implement Hub models of care, however, there is a dearth of research specifically evaluating Hubs targeted at families experiencing adve...

Introduction: Australia has been comparatively effective in preventing the transmission of COVID-19. The Sydney Local Health District [SLHD] used a “whole of health” integrated approach to respond to the pandemic. The aim of this study was to understand for whom, how and why this response worked, to inform a sustainable system transformation. Meth...

Drawing from literature on critical realism and realist social theory, this four-part presentation suggests a way for thinking about how mechanisms work at the social and psychological levels of a complex social system. In part 1, some common ground between critical realism, realist review and evaluation, and program evaluation is established. Next...

Introduction: Healthy Homes and Neighbourhoods (HHAN), an integrated care programme in the Sydney Local Health District (SLHD), seeks to address the needs of disadvantaged families through care coordination, as one of its components. This research aims to determine for whom, when and why the care coordination component of HHAN works, and establish...

This chapter reports on a small-scale action research conducted to examine undergraduates' understanding of academic dishonesty in higher education. The participants (n = 47) were undergraduates from the Sports Science and Management Program, and the Biological Sciences faculty in a university in Singapore, completing a compulsory science communica...

This book discusses the issue of academic misconduct and publication ethics in general and plagiarism in particular, with a focus on case studies in various universities around the world (notably in Japan, Singapore, Australia, USA, and Canada). We are especially interested in students’ and teachers’ perception of academic misconduct and their defi...

Background Healthy Homes and Neighbourhoods (HHAN) Integrated Care Initiative was established to improve the care of families with complex health and social needs who reside in Sydney Local Health District. HHAN seeks to provide long-term multi-disciplinary care coordination as well as enhance capacity building and promote integrated care. The crit...

Introduction: The Healthy Homes and Neighbourhoods (HHAN) Integrated Care Program seeks to enhance vulnerable family engagement with health and social services through a care coordination model. Besides servicing families in Sydney, HHAN has also established place-based initiatives (PBIs) in areas of disadvantage such as Redfern. The Redfern PBI co...

The development of scientific communication in Singapore can be described in terms of an evolving and increasingly complex relationship between discourses about science and its role in society, and the communication of science and its ideas, through formal education and other forums. From early beginnings with top-down government-initiated promotio...

This report provides a formative analysis and evaluation of the educational component of the Impact21 program that commenced at Torrens University Australia on 12th February 2019. Impact21 is a 2-year intensive education to work pilot program for 12 young adults with Down syndrome. In this report, the first year of the educational component of the...

Background Healthy Homes and Neighbourhoods (HHAN) Integrated Care Initiative was established to improve the care of families with complex health and social needs who reside in Sydney Local Health District. HHAN seeks to provide long-term multi-disciplinary care coordination as well as enhance capacity building and promotion of integrated care. We...

Introduction: In March 2014, the New South Wales (NSW) Government (Australia) announced the NSW Integrated Care Strategy. The NSW Government’s Integrated Care Strategy funding enabled the establishment of an integrated care initiative called Healthy Homes and Neighbourhoods (HHAN). The Initiative was designed as a population-based, family-centered,...

Background: We will describe here a translational social epidemiology protocol for confirming a critical realist “Theory of Neighbourhood Context, Stress, Depression, and the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD)”. The approach will include the concretising and contextualising of the above causal theory into programme theories for chi...

Introduction: In July 2015 Sydney Local Health District (SLHD) implemented an integrated care initiative for vulnerable families in the Inner West region of Sydney, Australia. The initiative was designed as a cross-agency care coordination network that would ensure that vulnerable families: had their complex health and social needs met; kept thems...

Introduction: In March 2014, the New South Wales (NSW) Government (Australia) announced the NSW Integrated Care Strategy. In response, a family-centred, population-based, integrated care initiative for vulnerable families and their children in Sydney, Australia was developed. The initiative was called Healthy Homes and Neighbourhoods. A realist tr...

This study investigated the oral and written communication needs of science undergraduate students from the disciplines of biology, chemistry, mathematics and econometrics, physics and sports science.

This preliminary workshop will support evaluators and researchers to use realist methods in integrated care and other complex evaluations. Because realist evaluation was initially developed using smaller-scale programs, methods need to be modified for large scale programs, while remaining consistent with underlying methodological principles. The w...

Researching teacher education involves understanding multiple layers of embedded, interdependent social contexts in a site of interest, their relations, and their organisation or structure. This paper looks at reviews of research into teacher education to find answers to three questions: (1) What do reviews tell us about research into teacher educa...

This article re-examines the contents of Singapore’s Thinking Schools Learning Nation (TSLN) and Teach Less Learn More (TLLM) educational initiatives, introduced and implemented to promote change and to prepare Singaporeans for a twenty-first century knowledge-based economy. Adopting a critical realist perspective that enables investigations into c...

By standards of international benchmarking tests, Singapore’s education system has been successful in making shifts needed to meet the emerging demands of the 21st century. Despite this recognition, locally, stubborn narratives of Singaporeans' educational experiences as being primarily didactic and exam-focused persist, with official and public co...

This paper focuses on the design of a critical realist review that deployed Bhaskar’s RRREIC schema (resolution, redescribing, retroduction, eliminating, identifying, correcting) and Pawson and Tilley’s Context-Mechanism-Outcome configuration (CMOc) underpinned by realist social theory. Methodologically, the review examined the relationship between...

This thesis reviews, from a critical realist perspective, a selection of research reports produced by the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice (CRPP) between 2003 and 2013. Parts one and two, address issues relating to meta- theoretical frameworks and refines the realist evaluation framework for research practice. Part 3 applies methods inf...

This chapter presents a novel guide to assist teachers in thinking differently about their adopted pedagogic approaches with ICT. The utility and usefulness of the learning task design mechanism is demonstrated through the specific context of language arts education in Singapore. The chapter will be of particular interest to teachers who want to fu...

The expectation for teachers in Singapore schools to incorporate the use of ICT in their lessons as a whole, necessitates an understanding of the claims, concerns and issues teachers have regarding this expectation. There is also a pressing need for teachers to be provided with a pedagogically supported and theoretically viable designing tool to gu...