The steps to conducting a process evaluation, can be broken down into planning, design and data collection, analysis, and reporting, as summarised below. A more detailed outline of conducting a process evaluation is provided by the Medical Research Council: Process evaluation of complex interventions (2015).  

Planning

• Ensure the research team possesses the necessary skills in both qualitative and quantitative methods, along with relevant interdisciplinary and theoretical expertise.
• Determine the degree of separation or integration between process and outcome evaluation teams, ensuring a balance between collaboration and process evaluation independence. Develop effective communication systems to ensure cohesive data integration from the start.

Design and conduct

• Clearly articulate the intervention and its causal assumptions regarding how it will be implemented, its mechanisms of change, and its expected impact.
• Identify priority research questions by consulting stakeholders and examining previous evaluations.
• Select quantitative methods to measure key variables to test hypothesised mechanisms of impact and qualitative methods to capture implementation experiences and unexpected pathways.
• Balance data collection across all sites with focused sampling and consider multiple time points to track changes over time.

Analysis

• Provide descriptive quantitative data on fidelity, dose, and reach, including variations among participants or sites.
• Integrate process data into outcome datasets to explore differences based on implementation and contextual factors.
• Analyse qualitative data iteratively, allowing early themes to inform later investigations.
• Ensure that quantitative and qualitative analyses complement each other, using qualitative methods to explore issues prior to designing quantitative methods  (exploratory design) and/or using qualitative methods to explain quantitative results (explanatory design).
• Report process data independently before trial outcomes to maintain objectivity.

Reporting

• Identify existing reporting guidance and report the logic model.
• Disseminate findings to policy and practice stakeholders.
• Highlight contributions to intervention theory and methodological advancements to engage a broader audience.