A Measurement Roadmap to Guide Implementation Practitioners in Selecting Implementation Measures

Strong measurement is critical for carrying out, monitoring, and evaluating implementation practice efforts. Accurate, reliable, and practical measures empower implementation teams to evaluate implementation outcomes and mechanisms of change. Poor measurement, however, is costly and impedes implementation practice. Despite substantial efforts to catalog and evaluate implementation measures, resources that guide the selection of measures are limited. As a result, practitioners still face challenges when identifying and selecting appropriate implementation measures. This paper addresses this gap by presenting a Measurement Roadmap, which offers a step-by-step guide and set of resources to help practitioners engage with the process of finding and evaluating measures for their implementation project. The Measurement Roadmap begins by detailing the importance of connecting measurement with implementation theories, models, and frameworks. Subsequently, recommendations for where and how to find measures are provided. The Measurement Roadmap provides practical explanations of psychometric properties and guides readers through a simple, three-step process for evaluating the face validity of a measure. Finally, the Measurement Roadmap provides guidance for navigating several possible paths that our team has traversed when identifying and selecting implementation measures: (1) finding an ideal measure, (2) finding a similar, but not perfectly aligned measure, (3) finding several measures that must be compared, and (4) finding no existing measures. We include a practitioner-focused handout of the Measurement Roadmap for quick reference.