Glossary

E

Education/Behavior change: One strategy for preventing injuries and violence. This strategy involves a set of learning experiences or activities that are specifically designed to facilitate voluntary adaptations of behavior that are conducive to health. See also Legislative/Enforcement and Technology/Engineering.

Evaluation: The systematic collection of information designed to answer specific questions about the project or program that has been implemented. Types of evaluation include:

• Needs assessment: A systematic process for gathering information about current conditions within a community that underlie the need for an intervention.
• Formative evaluation: An evaluation conducted early in the planning stages or early in implementation. It helps to define the scope of the program or project and to identify appropriate goals and objectives.
• Process evaluation: Assessing what activities were implemented, the quality of the implementation, and the strengths and weaknesses of implementation. Process evaluation is used to produce useful feedback for program refinement, to determine which activities were more successful than others, to document successful processes for future replication and to demonstrate program activities before demonstrating outcomes.
• Impact evaluation: Systematic process of collecting, analyzing and interpreting data to assess and evaluate the short-term outcomes of a program.
• Outcome evaluation: Systematic process of collecting, analyzing and interpreting data to assess and evaluate the long-term outcomes of a program.

Evaluation designs: A framework which guides the way in which an evaluation is conducted, including when and from what groups data will be collected. Types of evaluation designs include:

• Descriptive designs: Designs that are concerned with describing the general
  characteristics of the population or program of interest. Descriptive designs may also allow one to compare these characteristics between different groups of populations. These comparisons, however, are unable to prove cause and effect of the program. One example of descriptive evaluations includes:
• Case study design: Describes program, participants and its outcomes. May describe the program at one point in time or describe what is occurring over time.
• Experimental designs: Designs that are concerned with formally testing a hypothesis about the relationship of program activities to measurable outcomes. Experimental designs involve randomly assigning participants to intervention and comparison groups, and comparing characteristics between these groups. These comparisons are able to prove cause and effect of the program.
• Quasi-experimental designs: Designs where the characteristics of the intervention group are compared with the characteristics in a comparison group (this group does not receive the intervention), but persons are not randomly assigned to the different groups. One example of a quasi-experimental design includes:
• Pre/post design: Measurements are taken before and after the program is implemented.

Evidence-based (also referred to as science-based): Health endeavor in which there is informed, explicit and judicious use of evidence that has been derived from any of a variety of science and social science research methods.

Experimental designs: A type of evaluation design that is concerned with formally testing a hypothesis about the relationship of program activities to measurable outcomes. Experimental designs involve randomly assigning participants to intervention and comparison groups, and comparing characteristics between these groups. These comparisons are able to prove cause and effect of the program. See also Evaluation designs.

top