I am David J. Bernstein, and I am a Senior Study Director with Westat, an employee-owned research and evaluation company in Rockville, Maryland. I was an inaugural member of AEA, and was the founder and first Chair of the Government Evaluation Topical Interest Group.
Westat was hired by the U.S. Department of Education’s Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA) to conduct an evaluation of the Helen Keller National Center for Deaf-Blind Youths and Adults (HKNC). HKNC is a national rehabilitation program serving youth and adults who are deaf-blind founded by an Act of Congress in 1967, and operates under a grant from RSA, which is HKNC’s largest funding source.
The Westat evaluation was the first evaluation of HKNC in over 20 years, although HKNC submits performance measures and annual reports to RSA. RSA wanted to make sure that the evaluation included interviews with Deaf-Blind individuals who had taken vocational rehabilitation and independent living courses on the HKNC campus in Sands Point, New York. After meeting with HKNC management and teaching staff, it became clear that communication issues would be a challenge given the myriad of ways that Deaf-Blind individuals communicate. Westat and RSA agreed that in-person interviews with Deaf-Blind individuals would help keep the interviews simple, intuitive, and make sure that this critical stakeholder group was comfortable and willing to participate.
Hot Tips:
- Make use of gatekeepers and experts-in-residence. Principle Three encourages simple and intuitive design of materials to address users’ level of experience and language skills. For the HKNC Evaluation, interview guides went through multiple reviews, including review by experts in Deaf-Blind communication not associated with HKNC. Ultimately, it was HKNC staff that provided a critical final review to simplify the instruments since HKNC was familiar with the wide variety of communication skills of their former students.
- Plan ahead in regards to location and communication. Principle Seven calls for appropriate space to make anyone involved in data collection comfortable, including transportation accessibility and provision of interpreters, if needed. For the HKNC evaluation, interview participants were randomly selected who were within a reasonable distance of locations near HKNC regional offices. Westat worked with HKNC partners and HKNC regional representatives with whom interviewees were familiar. In the Los Angeles area, we brought the interviews to the interviewees, selecting locations that were as close as possible to where former HKNC students lived. Most importantly, Westat worked with HKNC to identify the Deaf-Blind individuals’ communication abilities and preferences, and had two interpreters on site for interviews. In one case we used a participant’s iPad with large print enabled to communicate interview questions.
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