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Dr Jane Mulcahy, Dr Catherine Naughton, and Professor Seán Redmond wrote an essay on the topic of “Theory of Change as a Tool for Tracking Intensive Family Programme Developments in Whitetown” in Theories of Change in Reality: Strengths, Limitations and Future Directions edited by Andrew Koleros, Marie-Hélène Hadrien and Tony Tyrell for Routledge (2024).

The involvement of children under the age of 18 in serious crime, often facilitated by their relationships with adult crime networks, is a significant problem in Ireland. Up to one thousand children are estimated to be embedded, or at risk of involvement, in criminal networks at any one time. These children comprise a tiny fraction of those who come into contact with the youth justice system, but they account for a substantial percentage of youth crime. Developing effective interventions to enable such children to desist from crime and other antisocial behaviour is a significant challenge for policy-makers and practitioners.

Mulcahy, Naughton and Redmond’s essay focuses on the theory of change for the Intensive Family Programme pillar in Whitetown, a real, but anonymised urban community in Ireland. This pilot programme consists of an intervention for children involved in adult crime networks in Ireland, initially funded from 2020 to 2023. The authors discuss the co-design of the theory of change with staff of the service provider and the need to adapt key aspects of the programme for the local context. The essay describes the Whitetown Programme and stages in the design approach, the sequences involved in developing the theory of change, and the initial testing; this demonstrates the value of the theory of change for charting programmatic changes of tack necessitated by on-the-ground testing. The essay provides an insight into the potential challenges involved in the implementation of dynamic interventions in the context of partial evidence with reference to theoretical and empirical research.