General Intervention Evaluation Overview
Once you have completed an evaluation of your partnership, you will want to consider evaluating your intervention efforts. This evaluation should reflect the active participation of all partners and community members that have been included in your work. This is essential and gives meaning to your work. Participatory evaluation means that everyone is involved in defining the questions that are addressed, collecting and tracking the information, assessing and interpreting the findings, and sharing findings with others. |
Below are some questions and methods you might consider asking as part of your evaluation process:
- What is your intention? What do you hope to accomplish? You can answer these questions by keeping and reviewing meeting minutes, documenting your intent by writing a mission statement and a set of goals and objectives.
- What have you done to address your concern? Here you might again review meeting minutes or notes. You might document stories told, photographs taken, pictures drawn and conversations about the reasons why people in your community are not as physically active as recommended. You may also videotape certain environmental conditions in your community or people who are engaging in physical activity. Other strategies could include keeping records of media coverage (print, audio and video) or visits with various political representatives.
- What do you think you would do again and what specific changes might improve the results of your actions? This requires some reflection that can be enhanced if you keep track of discussions and action steps in your minutes and notes. It is also helpful to ask people taking part in the process what they think worked and what they would like to see done differently in the future. This can be done through a questionnaire or a group discussion.
- What were some of the consequences of your actions? You might consider keeping track of programs planned and implemented, dollars generated for programs and policy initiatives, or changes in policy (e.g., physical education in schools) as a result of activities. You can track specific changes in structures (e.g., sidewalk improvements, a new community center or a new community with residential and commercials destinations in close proximity to one another) or behavior (e.g., increase in walking, biking or use of stairs) that may have been influenced by your efforts. It is also helpful to look for other more immediate impacts of your intervention in terms of increased awareness of the benefits of physical activity (e.g., a mass media campaign), increased social support for being active (e.g., a church-sponsored walk-a-thon) or changes in beliefs about exercise (e.g., a worksite program to educate employees that 3 ten minute bouts of physical activity at least five days a week provides health benefits). Longer-term health outcomes (e.g., reductions in the number of obese children or injuries in older adults) can also be documented if you have the resources needed to document these outcomes. Other important consequences to recognize are new partnerships that have been established or new understandings of how your actions have made a difference (e.g., a neighborhood walking club that increases the sense of community among neighbors).
It is helpful to link your activities to changes that have occurred in the community. These types of changes are often referred to as community indicators. To do this, you may consider seeking technical assistance from local organizations with evaluation expertise or researchers at colleges and universities. Likewise, in many cases, technical assistance can be useful when funding guidelines require you to link your activities and community indicators of change to health outcomes.
Some helpful hints to boost your evaluation:
- Involve partners and community members directly in the process.
- Define your Community of Interest.
- Focus on appropriate goals and document short-term changes or outcomes.
- Document results as quickly as possible.
- Gather baseline evidence (i.e., describe the community of interest before the intervention begins). Then, document changes in these indicators that can be used to track the success of your intervention (i.e., compare this information to the baseline evidence).
- Vividly describe your intervention activities and outcomes.
- Make sure the evaluation is confirming what people know as well as telling them something they don’t already know.
- Be open about shortcomings.
- Share and discuss findings as the project progresses.