Evaluation: Did You do it? Did it Matter?

Foreword

When a community develops and implements a program to prevent school violence, it is confronting a difficult problem and is creating solutions that span organizations, agencies, and programs. It’s about creating coalitions that will support each other psychologically and organizationally to promote effective action. One of the most important steps is to determine the best fit between an evidence-based prevention practice and local community needs and norms.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s School Violence Prevention Initiative, under the direction of the Center for Mental Health Services, has funded a number of grant programs that have identified a wide variety of research-based prevention programs from which communities can choose. To do so, a community chooses an evidence-based program that suits local needs and sets it in place. While the reasons for the choice are clear, the expected outcome is not always guaranteed. It’s necessary to monitor – evaluate – whether what you’ve instituted remains on target and, if not, what you can do about it.

ACTION Pamphlet 4, Evaluation: Did You Do It? Did It Matter? is intended to help you learn about and use evaluation techniques to gauge the effect and impact of the program you have instituted. Not only does evaluation show whether the program is working, it can help sustain its life over time. The community will truly know what has been accomplished when the evaluation is complete.

Charles G. Curie, M.A.,
A.C.S.W.
Administrator
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration

Gail Hutchings, M.P.A.
Acting Director
Center for Mental Health Services
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration

How you think about evaluation is important! Evaluation should not be thought of as an attempt to find fault, a diversion of scarce resources from services, or even a tool to monitor compliance, say evaluators and practitioners. Think of it as a decision support model that generates useful information for the ongoing success of your program.

At one time, most people simply evaluated their program’s process: “We said we’d do thus and so, and we did it, therefore we were successful.” However, now outcomes also are being scrutinized. Practitioners want to know whether the programs they implement have positive results: funders and partners increasingly insist on knowing. Evaluation activities provide well-founded documentation of program outcomes. Even when it is too early to prove long-term behavioral and attitudinal changes, it is possible to assess immediate and short-term outcomes, such as the viability and utility of a community collaboration, and the extent to which a chosen intervention has an impact on risk and protective, or resiliency, factors for youth violence and related behaviors.

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