Behavioral Health

Best of aea365 week: Lija Greenseid on Using a Readability Calculator

My name is Lija Greenseid. I am a Senior Evaluator, with Professional Data Analysts, Inc. in Minneapolis, MN. We conduct evaluations of stop-smoking programs. Smokers generally have lower education levels than the general population. Therefore, we want to make sure the materials we develop are understandable to smokers. Rad Resource: Use a “readability calculator” to …

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Robin Kipke on Resources for Evaluating Social Media

Greetings! I’m Robin Kipke and I work for the Center for Evaluation and Research at the University of California, Davis, which provides evaluation training and technical assistance to the 100+ projects which advocate for tobacco control policies in our state. To help these organizations discern how to effectively harness the power of social media, I’m …

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Linda Cabral on Using Cultural Brokers on Evaluation Teams

Hello, I’m Linda Cabral, a Senior Project Director from the Center for Health Policy and Research at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In an effort to more fully engage people from different cultural backgrounds and their communities in one of our recently-completed qualitative evaluation projects for our State’s Department of Mental Health, we employed …

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SCEA Week: Bill Shennum & Kate LaVelle on the Multiple Uses of Multiple Data Sources

Greetings. We are Bill Shennum and Kate LaVelle, staff members in the Research Department at Five Acres, a nonprofit child and family services agency located in Altadena, CA and serving the greater Los Angeles area. We work as internal evaluators to support outcome measurement and continuous quality improvement within the organization. In our roles as …

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Laura Cody on Evaluation Planning Process with Youth

My name is Laura Cody, and I am a Community Health Specialist at the Regional Center for Healthy Communities in Cambridge, MA.  We work with many substance abuse prevention coalitions helping them build on their strengths and reduce underage drinking in their communities.  I will describe a process we used with a group of youth …

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Stacy Carruth on using Wordle to Understand Substance Abuse

My name is Stacy Carruth and I am a Community Health Specialist at a Regional Center for Healthy Communities in Massachusetts.  Much of the work we do is supporting community coalitions working on substance abuse prevention.  Two communities we work with are funded to reduce fatal and non-fatal opiate overdose, an issue of concern in …

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Michael Schooley & Monica Oliver on Distinguishing Evaluation, Research, & Surveillance

We are Michael Schooley, chief of the Applied Research and Evaluation branch in the Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention at CDC, and Monica Oliver, an evaluator in the branch. As public health evaluators, we often encounter the question of when a particular endeavor is ‘evaluation,’ when it is ‘research,’ and when it might …

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Jim Burdine on How to Present Community Assessment Data Back to a Community

I’m Jim Burdine and a few weeks ago I posted a “tip-a-day” (see post here) on presenting community health assessment data back to the community. This is part two of that discussion. Last time I focused on “what to present” this posting focuses on “how to present . . . with results.” There are two …

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Cheri Hoffman on Youth-Led Evaluation

I’m Cheri Hoffman, a program evaluator with Centerstone Research Institute in Nashville, Tennessee, evaluating two System of Care grants for children’s mental health. The values of a System of Care demand that the entire process, including the evaluation, be youth-guided. We recently trained selected members of the program’s youth council in research and program evaluation …

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Jim Burdine on Presenting Community Assessment Data to its Community – What to Present

I’m Jim Burdine, Assistant Dean for Public Health Practice and Co-PI/Director of a Prevention Research Center at the School of Rural Public Health, Texas A&M. Over the last 30 years I’ve used community health status assessment as both a community organizing tool and intervention planning tool. In more than 200 different communities (including multiple iterations …

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