I am writing from the University of Puerto Rico at the municipality of Carolina, Puerto Rico. We want to start a pilot program at one public high school at Carolina regarding gender violence prevention. We don't have a budget for an evaluation, but want to do some kind of evaluation of our own. I was wondering if you could help me identify:
1.the best research techniques for high school students (pre/post test or focus groups or both?)
2. Is there any research instrument validated regarding gender violence prevention for high school students that we can use as reference? Are they available in Spanish?
3. Since we don't want the students to feel is just another class, I think that if we use a pre/post test technique, they will feel is "another test" and will be unwilling to complete or answer it with concentration and honesty.
Since we will be offering more than one workshop, my concern is that if for the first one they see we are going to give them "tests", this could make them uninterested to take the other workshops.
Any advice will be more than appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Hi Luz,
Thank you for visiting the Community Tool Box (CTB) and Ask an Advisor, hopefully we can provide you with timely, useful, accurate, and directly applicable information to help you in designing your evaluation, selecting an appropriate instrument, and collecting data. Let me address each question in turn if you don't mind even though they are very much interrelated, then I'll direct you to the resources we have right here in the CTB.
High school students, they're a challenge, but we've been conducting research with them for years through a variety of modalities so it's definitely do-able. In terms of your methodological choice and design, they will be informed by your research questions and the constraints you will likely face in the research milieu. So, if I read your questions correctly, there will be some sort of gender violence intervention in which the high schoolers will take part and you want to know whether the intervention was effective in, say increasing their knowledge, improving their attitudes, or impacting present and future behavior. If this is correct, then I think you're spot on in wanting to conduct survey research using a repeated measures design (pre-test/post-test with matched samples). Focus groups and interviews have their place if you're interested in getting a rich description of a phenomenon, but these methods are time and labor intensive and I'm not sure either will yield the information you want in as efficient and cost-effective manner. Plus, it's far easier and efficient to analyze quantitative data than purely qualitative data which requires a code book, teasing out themes, etc. (unless you are taking a grounded theory approach). Here's a thought, you could always conduct follow-up interviews with a random sample if in your data you notice there are outliers or want to capture data sometime in the future, say six months after the intervention. Again, your research questions and milieu will drive your methods. Also, think about where high school students are from a developmental aspect and the potential biases that are inherent in conducting focus groups or interviews with this age group. Imagine having a group of high schoolers together in one room for a focus group (makes me a little queasy truth be told). As you so well know, there is a strong desire to fit in, to be socially desirable so you might not get the most truthful responses if they are feeding off each other. Individual interviews might yield more credible evidence provided there aren't any issues with the interviewer-high schooler interface; high schoolers can suddenly be very reticent to offer any personal insights. So, with this age group, my advice is to go with an anonymous and confidential survey administered under conditions in which it makes it less likely responses will be influenced by social desirability; you can't totally eliminate social desirability, but at least you can minimize its effects.
Regarding, a gender violence prevention instrument to be administered to high schoolers, preferably in Spanish, that's a bit of a tough one. I first rooted around in the CTB, but didn't come up with anything. So I did a Google search (the old stand-by) and found a number of links, but I'm not sure how useful they'll be; you'll need to go through each one to make such a determination. What you may need to do is find a suitable survey (s) that measure analogous constructs and adapt it to your own purposes; if it's not in Spanish then it certainly be translated (i.e., English to Spanish, Spanish back to English, English back to Spanish, etc. until there is a one-one correspondence between the two versions such that the Spanish items are requesting exactly the same information as the English items). Okay, here are the links:
http://cchealth.org/topics/violence/pdf/youth_survey.pdfhttps://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SHMD8LShttps://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/yv_compendium.pdf (this one has a lot of instruments from the CDC)
Although these aren't surveys per se, these sites have a lot of great information to inform your intervention and should be given a close read; they might also inform your thinking about surveying youth:
http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/intimatepartnerviolence/teen_datin...http://www.vawnet.org/applied-research-papers/print-document.php?doc_id=...http://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1136&c...
Regarding survey administration, if you couch it in the right way the high school students won't necessarily view it as a test. What you're talking about is getting students to be excited about and motivated to take a survey. Seriously, it's all about how you pitch it. The key ingredients are making sure they know: why they're being surveyed (i.e., because they have some sort of unique perspective that only they possess); how valuable their time and responses are; the specific type of contribution their responses will like make; how much time it will take (estimated through pilot testing - always pilot test with a similar sample); that their responses are confidential and won't be shared with anyone; that their participation is private; that no one will see their responses; and that they are free to withdraw at any time during the survey without penalty. Other thoughts: the briefer the survey (i.e., the fewer the items the better) to keep them motivated and focused; provide incentives for survey participation (I highly recommend this, especially with high school students - food or gift cards are always appropriate); and because there is a significant time gap between pre and post survey administrations survey fatigue won't be an issue.
As mentioned, we have some resources on survey development, in the event you can't find a suitable survey that I think will be instructive and informative; this is really good stuff, and as an applied researcher/evaluator I really appreciate how well constructed these resources are: start on our home page and click the "Learn A Skill" button in the top left corner, click the "Table of Contents" and scroll down to the section entitled "Evaluating Community Programs and Initiatives." Click on "Chapter 38 - Some Methods for Evaluating Comprehensive Community Initiatives" and then "Section 7 - Behavioral Surveys." This is a fantastic primer on survey development and administration. Read through the "Main Section" and also the "Tools," it will be worth the read.
Well Luz, that's about all I've got for you today. I hope that what I've discussed with you is helpful, if not, please come back and visit the CTB and we'll work together to find a suitable answer. Again Luz, thank you for your great question, we wish you much success in your endeavors. Be well, take care, do good work.
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