NCJ Number
175872
Date Published
1995
Length
243 pages
Annotation
This guide has been developed to help drug abuse treatment program administrators and staff who have no previous experience or formal training in evaluation with planning and conducting evaluations of their programs.
Abstract
The first chapter familiarizes the reader with evaluation through a discussion of its purposes, methods and procedures, types of evaluation questions, and key terms. The second chapter focuses on a key step before the evaluation: describing the program by outlining the goals, objectives, activities, and milestones of the program. Chapter 3 discusses "Framing Evaluation Questions," as it instructs the reader in how to compose questions that evaluations can answer; and chapter 4 explains how to translate general questions about the program into specific and answerable questions. The next chapter introduces evaluation design, which involves various ways of structuring an evaluation so program staff can obtain useful conclusions regarding the evaluation questions. A chapter on selecting, adapting, and developing data-collection instruments and procedures deals with constructing and pretesting surveys, record-keeping forms, and other data-collection instruments needed for the evaluation. Chapter 7 continues discussing data collection, as it addresses how to build the database, protect clients, ensure the reliability and validity of the data, and address any problems that arise. Another chapter introduces methods for analyzing and displaying evaluation results, followed by a chapter that provides pointers on how to present evaluation results in a way that meets the information needs of the staff, sponsors, and other important constituencies. For other individual documents in the series, see NCJ-175871 and 175873; for the complete packet, see NCJ-175870. 56 exhibits, 19 references, and a packet of looseleaf worksheets and agendas