Table 1 Overview of the ICA approach
Aims to answer… | ○ How do interventions differ from one another? |
â—‹ Which of these differences in characteristics appears to be important? | |
○ What would an ideal version of the intervention ‘look like’? | |
Assumes that… | ○ Characteristics that are present in all/many effective interventions are worthy of attention |
â—‹ Characteristics that may be present in one/small numbers of intervention(s) may be less important | |
Addresses the challenge of poor quality intervention descriptions by… | ○ Using an inductive approach to explore the nature of intervention features |
○ Making use of trialists’ informally reported experience-based evidence |