Evaluate what? Evaluate THIS.

I think evaluation is often the ugly stepsister that no one thinks about. Kind of like public health. I feel like very few people that I talk to know exactly what public health is.

Only the prevention of disease in millions of people and increased quality of life for even more. No. Big. Deal.

To be honest, though, I didn't know exactly what public health was until I researched it further. I was thinking...I like health, and I like...public things...? Then when I started studying public health, evaluation did not mean that much to me either. Formative, randomized control, impact, process- WHAT? Okay, well now that I'm in my third semester, I really do understand how important evaluating programs is. Money will most likely always be an issue (until I marry my billionaire husband) and being able to figure out what methods are most cost-effective are always going to be important for making the most impact (something I'd like to be able to do). Evaluation of materials is always interesting and never seems to turn out the way you would have thought. Humans are irrational and weird and we think we know ourselves, but it seems like we never really do. An example being our Gardasil campaign- we thought people would be influenced by the fear of putting their partners at risk for HPV. Turns out, this was not true. Sigh. Oh well, I guess at least we know how to effectively market to them.

The Evaluation Process

I never realized how important the evaluation process was until now. After reading dozens of articles for Project GOL, I realize that evaluating is almost as important as program implementation. How do we know if something works if it hasn't been evaluated? We don't. This is why it's so important. For our 666 class, we are currently working on evaluating our program plans. The important thing to remember is that we created our programs based on programs that have worked on our population. How do we know this? Because they were evaluated. Based on our research, we found programs that have been proven to work for our population. Now that we have to evaluate our program, we can base it on previous research. We know that our program will work because it has been proven to do so. I don't know why it never occurred to me how important the evaluation process was because now it just seems like common sense. It was mentioned that there is an evaluation certification. This seems like it would be worth looking into. Maybe a career in evaluation is in my future. who knows?

Evaluation Love

At the risk of sounding incredibly nerdy, I loooovve evaluation processes. I think the people who evaluate programs and campaigns are incredibly under appreciated. Especially because evaluation methods help research teams, program developers and stakeholders understand how their interventions worked, why they worked, and what they can improve for the next round. Essentially, without evaluation processes, we would not have "evidence-based interventions." I also like the fact that these processes are highly structured but ]include a creative component as many times, you have to "think outside the box" to understand why certain things didn't work and how they could be modified to work in the future . Based on my enthusiasm for evaluation, it is not surprising that this week's lecture was my favorite. I really appreciate the chance to learn the details of evaluation methods. In PH 666 and 663, we've learned about the specific types of evaluations, how they relate to goals and objectives and specific examples of each. This is incredibly helpful in my work life as I am involved in evaluating programs but did not have the evaluation specific vocabulary to describe exactly what I've been working on for the last year!

Good evaluations are hard to come by....

So while researching for my global health research paper, I have become increasingly more frustrated trying to find easy to read evaluations of programs. I am currently trying to find information on two poverty alleviation programs: Oportunidades and Fome Zero, implemented in Mexico and Brazil respectively. I am really just trying to see if the programs were successful, which you think would be an easy task, but has turned out to be more difficult than expected. Of course I have found the 300 page documents where are answers are hidden inside, but who really wants to sift through all those pages. I just need a straightforward, easy to read document that tells me if the programs were successful or not. This reminds me of what we learned in class that when evaluation is done, the results need to be easy to read and precise in order for stakeholders and people interested in the program to be able to understand if the program was successful or not. I definitely understand why this point is important, I feel like I am wasting so much time trying to find what I need. Not to mention my research solidifies why evaluation is so important; otherwise I wouldn't know if the programs are worth recommending implementation in other communities. I guess I just assume that evaluation is done on all interventions, it does seem really wasteful to spend money on an intervention and not know if it was successful or should be implemented in other communities. I am glad evaluation has been done on these programs I am researching, but I wish the results were presented in an easier to read format.

Importance of Evaluation

Looking back at my experiences with the children's safety center, where I used to volunteer, I often wonder how they evaluated the program. This center sold home safety products, helmets and provided educational information to families in the Portland area. I'm sure that inventory would be one means of assessing the amount of materials that are sold. However, I don't ever recall them doing any kind of surveys for assessing dissemination of knowledge. We did keep track of references from physician's, so I think there is a lot of information collected that can keep track of process evaluation. In the last couple months that I was there, I worked on a lot of press releases to be distributed monthly, pertaining to the center's monthly topic of choice (i.e. fire safety, pedestrian safety, water safety, etc.). I am not sure if they eventually distributed these to local news stations. If they did, I am not sure that they would evaluate the reach that these broadcasts would reach. However, as far as outcome evaluation, I don't think the program had anything in place to track changes.