Once you’ve collected data, you need to turn the raw data into a form that is more useful for driving decision making. That means you need to analyze the data in some way. Qualitative and quantitative data are analyzed in different ways.
Evaluation design answers an important set of questions about how the evaluation will roll out, specifically it answers particular questions related to data collection:
Before planning for data collection, analysis and use, you should answer some additional questions about the context of your evaluation.
Outcomes are often a critical part of program development and evaluation. There are evaluation models that don’t require pre-determined outcomes (goal-free evaluation, for example) and innovative program development models often do not involve pre-establishing specific outcomes and rather look for emergent outcomes. However, most of us will be involved in developing and implementing programs and evaluations that require some level of specificity around outcomes or what we hope to achieve with our efforts.
This section provides an introduction on how to do evaluation and outlines general steps to take when conducting a program evaluation. While this section does contain tips and tools, they are best implemented in the context of a well-defined and specific evaluation approach, which can be chosen and designed to be appropriate to both the specific type of intervention you want to evaluate and the context in which you will evaluate it.
If you are looking for resources and information to support your journey of evaluating sexual violence prevention work, then you have come to the right place. We built this toolkit to increase your knowledge, give you access to useful tools, and point you toward additional resources. The goal of this toolkit is to increase the capacity to implement program evaluation for sexual violence prevention work by providing tools and guidance for both program implementers and those who support them.
April 2024 marks twenty 23 years of SAAM — a campaign that shines a light on the issues of sexual harassment, assault, and abuse and focuses on solutions to ending these types of violence.
Evaluation involves more than setting outcomes and determining data collection methods to measure the achievement of those outcomes. Just as prevention programming can be driven by one or more theories and approaches – and the programming will vary depending on the theories and approaches chosen – evaluation also varies depending on the approach or framework chosen to guide it.
“A social justice-oriented evaluation examines the holistic nature of social problems. It seeks to increase understanding of the interdependency among individual, community, and society using a more judicious democratic process in generating knowledge about social problems and social interventions and using this knowledge to advance social progress” (Thomas & Madison, 2010, p. 572)
You may already have some basic idea of what evaluation is or what it can do for you.