How much evidence is there for the influence of our intervention on a valued outcome? Is that a lot? Can we compare these numbers across pathways?

In this map, six sources told stories which start with our intervention and end with Wellbeing (tracing threads). Is this a lot?

Well, we can compare that with the total number of sources to make a source-mention-proportion, to say that 6 out of 24 sources mentioned this pathway.

Or we can compare it with the number of sources mentioning Wellbeing at all, to say that 6 out of the 16 sources mentioning Wellbeing told stories which began with our intervention.

Or we can compare it with the number of sources telling stories ending with Wellbeing and beginning with a different intervention.

Or we can compare any of these figures with the same figures from a previous time point.

Using numbers and proportions like this in a fundamentally qualitative approach like causal mapping can be very useful but we have to be careful. These are quite fragile indicators which can be easily influenced by other factors (for example, how visible was our intervention?) and can be hard to generalise.

We should always also consider the evidence itself behind each link by looking at the quotes.