An Alpha, Beta and Gamma Approach to Evaluating Occupational Health Organizational Interventions: Learning from the Measurement of Work-Family Conflict Change

Abstract

Given the rapid growth of intervention research in the occupational health sciences and related fields (e.g. work-family), we propose that occupational health scientists adopt an "alpha, beta, gamma" change approach when evaluating intervention efficacy. Interventions can affect absolute change in constructs directly (alpha change), changes in the scales used to assess change (beta change) or redefinitions of the construct itself (gamma change). Researchers should consider the extent to which they expect their intervention to affect each type of change and select evaluation approaches accordingly. We illustrate this approach using change data from groups of IT professionals and health care workers participating in the STAR intervention, designed by the Work Family Health Network. STAR was created to effect change in employee work-family conflict via supervisor family-supportive behaviors and schedule control. We hypothesize that it will affect change via all three change approaches-gamma, beta, and alpha. Using assessment techniques from measurement equivalence approaches, we find results consistent with some gamma and beta change in the IT company due to the intervention; our results suggest that not accounting for such change could affect the evaluation of alpha change. We demonstrate that using a tripartite model of change can help researchers more clearly specify intervention change targets and processes. This will enable the assessment of change in a way that has stronger fidelity between the theories used and the outcomes of interest. Our research has implications for how to assess change using a broader change framework, which employs measurement equivalence approaches in order to advance the design and deployment of more effective interventions in occupational settings.; Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s41542-022-00122-y.; Competing Interests: Conflict of InterestOn behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest. (© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.)