Denece Dodson and Lyn Paleo on “Adhesive Formats” as an Alternative to Evaluation Post-tests

Hi! Denece Dodson and Lyn Paleo are evaluators at First 5 Contra Costa California, a public foundation that funds programs serving young children.

Many evaluators wrestle with ways to encourage clients of health and social programs to complete evaluation forms—especially those who are uncomfortable with or hostile toward pre- or post-tests.  An innovative way to achieve client interest in completing an evaluation form is to use an adhesive format — dots, stickers, or sheets of labels.

Using Adhesive Formats for evaluation is conceptually very different than using dots for priority-setting.  Adhesive Formats can assess opinions, experiences, and even knowledge of individuals or groups.

Hot Tip: Here are two examples:

• At the end of a brief new parent training held near agricultural fields, new mothers are given a sheet with 14 round labels that display a picture/icon and a few words in Spanish and English; half show signs of distress in infants and the other half show appropriate parental responses.  Pull them off, stick the matching pairs together, and turn them in.
• To assess fidelity to a specific therapeutic / social service, model each family member and case worker on a Wrap team place ten dots on a small poster listing the model’s process steps. Differing views about how well the team achieves the model’s principles are immediately discussed and the number of dots (color-coded for type of team member) is entered into a spreadsheet for aggregate summaries.

Hot Tip: Adhesive Formats are different than traditional written assessments.

1)      Participants find these formats engaging.  Images combined with short phrases engage visual respondents; positioning the adhesives engages kinesthetic respondents.

2)      When conducted on the group level, the first-stage results are immediate and transparent to all; further analysis can be conducted on the aggregate level.

3)      Evaluation data collection becomes part of the intervention, rather than a separate activity.  Facilitators / program staff can move the participants from the activity of completing an Adhesive Format pre-test to the first program activity as a smooth transition.

Rad Resource: – Click here for a complete set of files that demonstrate an example of using an Adhesive Format to assess the level of support that a new mother has to raise her new baby.  Included are the Balloon stickers of resources, sample forms on which to place the stickers, the tally sheet used to record the results for the evaluator, and the data entry / automated-reporting excel sheet.

This contribution is from the aea365 Tip-a-Day Alerts, by and for evaluators, from theAmerican Evaluation Association. Please consider contributing – send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. Want to learn more from Denece and Lyn? They’ll be presenting as part of the Evaluation 2011 Conference Program, November 2-5 in Anaheim, California.