This paper emerges from an evaluation conducted by the author into the impact of a community-based intervention scheme designed to reduce perceived levels of "anti-social behaviour" amongst young people living in deprived communities. Drawing from this evaluation, the paper discusses the difficulties in assessing quantifiable measures of…

Reports such as this typically begin with a statistic designed to highlight a problem. The girls and boys to whom this edition of "The State of the World's Children" is dedicated are not problems. Rather, each is a sister, brother or friend who has a favourite dish, song or game; a daughter or son with dreams and the desire to fulfil…

Administrators of community-based treatment programs are increasingly being required to utilize psychometrically validated instruments to measure the effectiveness of their interventions. However, developers of psychometric measures have often failed to report strategies relevant to the administration of these measures in nontraditional settings…

This article presents an outcome-based model for evaluating school and community programs serving at-risk adolescents, and a cost-effective technique for comparing the progress of youth receiving an intervention with youth in a pseudocontrol group. The outcomes considered most important for success were derived from the literature pertaining to…

To debunk the myth that evaluation is a process better left to people with a PhD, this guide describes how organizations and coalitions can develop and utilize an evaluation strategy to make underage drinking prevention programs successful and effective. This booklet first describes the purpose of evaluation as well as the myths and facts about…

Community coalitions (CCs) have labored with some difficulty to demonstrate empirical evidence of effectiveness in preventing a wide range of adolescent problem behaviors. Training and technical assistance (TA) have been identified as important elements in promoting improved functioning of CCs. A reliable, valid, and inexpensive method to assess…

Underage drinking prevention has two goals: prevent harm to the individual drinker and prevent harm to society. Modern prevention programs should be measured not by their intentions, but by their consequences: reducing the number of criminal events, reducing the amount of harm to individuals, and reducing the harm to society. This guide discusses…

This guide details what coalitions and organizations need to do to insure the enforcement and judicial communities are active partners in the effort to reduce underage drinking. One of the first tasks discussed is the necessity for groups to understand the needs and concerns of law enforcement and to recognize that underage drinking enforcement…

In 1990, the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development convened a Task Force to guide the work on a new Project on Youth Development and Community Programs. The major goals of this project are to expand the scope and availability of developmentally appropriate, community-based services for young adolescents, particularly those in high-risk…

This paper summarizes the process of instituting a standardized mental health assessment protocol in a community health treatment program serving maltreated youth. The assessment program was intended to: (1) provide descriptive data regarding the populating utilizing the service; (2) examine the efficacy of therapeutic interventions and monitor…

Recommendations for feasible and rigorous evaluation design formulated by a 1991 conference on the evaluation of comprehensive community interventions are summarized and illustrated through the example of a program for drug risk reduction. Implications of a multisite design with matched pairs randomized into intervention and comparison conditions…

The checklists, tips, and examples will help persons involved with youth participation projects demonstrate the impact of a project. They will also help check for project strengths and weaknesses. Including the introduction, there are seven chapters. Chapter 2, "How Should Your Evaluation Look?" discusses what questions should be asked,…

The evolution of health education programs aimed at reducing the use of tobacco is discussed, and out-of-school educational programs are compared with in-school programs. Further, methodological differences in program evaluations were considered. Out-of-school programs are defined as involving several dimensions not found in schools: (1) goals and…

Over the past quarter-century, evaluation researchers have recognized the importance of documenting implementation practices of programs as they are transferred from controlled to real-world settings. As programs become widely disseminated in the general population, there is a tendency for practitioners to alter programs in a manner more conducive…

Recruiting schools and kids to participate in drug prevention evaluations is no longer, if it ever was, a "done deal." Since the mid-1980s, schools have been inundated with requirements for drug programs and requests to cooperate with program evaluations. As a consequence, both treatment and control schools are harder to find. In addition, many…