Lisa's Medi Notes: Program Development and Evaluation

Program Development and Evaluation

Assessment 2

By Lisa Christian

Concise evaluation purpose

The purpose of this evaluation is to raise awareness and encouragement for active transport of local mothers of the suburb of Pape and to provide justification as why it can increase health.

Evaluation questions for at least two levels of evaluation
- What age group are mothers, what language and what socioeconomic groups do they fall into?
- How can active transport increase health for mothers?
Qualitative and/or quantitative designs for evaluation questions

All females above the 12 to 60, can be surveyed to ask their opinions on actively staying healthy, how often they use active means of transport, what financial background they have, what culture they are from, how long have they been a local, what languages they speak, how many children they have or intend to have, and so on. These types of questions can be answered online in forms with options, this type of data that can be categorised and sorted is called quantitative data. For the questions that ask their opinions, these answers are qualitative research.

Evaluation indicators

These are “...a specific, observable, and measurable accomplishment or change that shows the progress made toward achieving a specific output or outcome in your logic model or work plan. Common examples of indicators include: participation rates, attitudes, individual behaviours, incidence and prevalence.”(cdc.gov, 2023.)

For example, this means to use the data provided early to explain a commonality. eg. 122 mothers from Vietnamese backgrounds prefer to work in a Vietnamese bakery or restaurant. * Being clear with the numbers is an evaluation indicator.

To draw out such indicators, a meeting with stakeholders to brainstorm, ideas of who local mothers might be and use those questions to be specific in surveying the community.

“Keep in mind, some information that is important to track may not have indicators associated with them. For example, some aspect of the program may be qualitative (e.g. describing the nature of a partnership). Sometimes what is important isn’t always quantifiable.”(cdc.gov, 2023.) This means, that qualitative questions are open questions where responses could mean anything and can't be guessed as option. It also allows for a larger, more diverse expectation and open-mindeness for answers.

Data collection methods

For this survey, I would like to send out surveys via Survey Monkey, over email.

Resources and timeline

A reliable, modern computer, that can be used with lists of emails from all females in the local Pape area. Maybe the local library or council have these.

Justification of the chosen evaluation approach

Quantitative research has been used for a long time and is a very popular form of research, perhaps because of the good amount of information you can collect, while being able to view coincidences and trends.

Sometimes its important to take a mix of both qualitative and quantitative data, on the same form. In Survey Monkey, the designer is able to create forms that can hold answers to options and to textarea form fields for longer, more expressive responses.

What are the ideal objectives to collect of this survey? Well what we need to find out for the Pape council, in Melbourne, is how many mothers are aware that active transport is actually a better alternative for their health and how they'd like to embrace it. So its a mix of both forms of data, that is needed to be queried. Also, we should ask the very important question of 'why' at the end.

Qualitative research is non-numerical data. (SurveyMonkey, 2023.) It allows the researcher to get an in-depth understanding of why and how situations differ for the person being interviewed.

“In contrast, quantitative research involves gathering numerical data that can be subjected to statistical analysis in order describe the qualities and characteristics of a dataset, to understand patterns and to find relationships or correlations between data points.” (SurveyMonkey, 2023.)

There is a great degree of versatility with collecting quantitative research.

The researcher can gather a range of questions with a variety and collection of differences in a short amount of time. This data can be sorted into cross sections and patterns. You can't do that so much, with open questions, just with select responses.

“Qualitative data is often very detailed, but the tradeoff is that it takes a very long time to collect and analyze. In contrast, quantitative research data can be captured very quickly, and if you use tools like SurveyMonkey’s analysis tools, statistical analysis can be almost immediate. This is very useful if you need insight critically.”(SurveyMonkey, 2023.)

“Quantitative research often (but not always!) makes use of samples selected through probability based methods, like random sampling or cluster sampling. Randomized sampling approaches are considered to be the best way to sample because they yield a sample that is representative of the wider population, which increases the ability to generalize the results of the research to the wider population.”(SurveyMonkey, 2023.)

This means that its easy to prepare mathematical comparisons of the data, however with qualitative, the answers take longer to analyse. So the quantitative answers on everyone's mind will be apparent first but the open minded questions will have to be thought out individually and look for any common similarities in expression.