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Question: We are looking for assessment tools for use with community based organizations related to a variety of health issues. We want to train college students and/or local people to do the assessments and provide the data/analysis to the CBO. Does the toolbox have assessment tools or links to sites providing tools. We want to pilot a tool to get things started.
Answer: Thanks for asking this excellent question. It is always ideal when you can find the best assessment tools for your specific purposes. Of course, that is not always easy. In your case, you are focusing on assessment for community-based organizations and you want tools that can be utilized by someone at the college student level. One of the first issues that comes to mind is whether your goal is to evaluate the functions and work of the CBO(s) itself. Or if you are more interested in examining efficacy in the sense of client outcomes. The latter is a slightly different challenge. Other decisions you will have to make also come to mind. For instance, are you evaluating prevention or treatment efforts, or something in between, or something altogether different? Now if your main goal is to understand, evaluate, and improve the structure and functioning of the organization itself, you might want to look into frameworks and tools related to Empowerment Evaluation. The advantage here is that the goal of empowerment evaluation is for the organization to evaluate itself. Someone at a college school level would be an ideal person to help facilitate such an evaluation. http://eevaluation.blogspot.com/ or http://cie.asu.edu/volume1/number4/index.html You also mentioned the CBOs were related to a variety of health issues. Perhaps you are more interested in efficacy, and assessing the health or health changes of clients. If there is a specific health issue (e.g., HIV/AIDS), you may want to be assessing variables directly related to that problem. If your interest is more in general health issues, there is a good measure we found at: http://www.pdhealth.mil/clinicians/sf36v2.asp and for instructions: http://www.pdhealth.mil/guidelines/downloads/SF-36_Primer.pdf There is also a pretty good health behavior risk survey available at: http://www.mass.gov/Eeohhs2/docs/dph/behavioral_risk/survey_07.pdf However, there is always an advantage to modifying and creating your own assessment instruments that are specific to the contexts of the settings and local community needs. You may want to find general measures that exist and improve on them. The steps are typically to develop more specific aims and goals related to the types of change you most want to see. Writing out short and simple questions, working to make sure they are clear, and that the overall instrument is not too lengthy. You can put them on five point scales, each ranging from Very Likely, Likely, Neutral, Unlikely, Very Unlikely or some similar variation. You can also add some more open-ended questions that will help you triangulate and expand on the quantitative data. Once your measures are developed, you can always use them to study the organization/clients at one time point and at a later time point, examining differences in the two sets of scores. All in all, whether you are searching for something that already exists or are ready to adapt new measures, empowerment evaluation, and the general health measure we provide links to, are good starting places.
Question Date: Thu, 01/24/2008