Data-driven Approaches to Monitoring and Evaluating Environmental Strategies

DESCRIPTION

Increase coalitions’ capacity to collect and use data for the purposes of: identifying priority targets for environmental interventions (including the “intervening variables”), selecting appropriate environmental strategies, monitoring progress in the implementation of those strategies and adjusting implementation efforts as needed, and assessing the impacts of those efforts.

Topics for presentation and discussion will include: – the development and use of logic models – identifying data sources and measures – methods for collecting useful process evaluation – distinguishing between process, formative, and outcome evaluation
(and the limitations of each within the context of community-based interventions).

Examples used in the presentations will be geared primarily towards substance use (alcohol in particular), although the underlying concepts and methods will be generalizable to goals and strategies employed by grantees focused on other outcomes as well.

Although grantees will already be past the planning stage for the current year and well into implementation, the workshop is intended to provide skills and resources that will be helpful in future projects, as well as provide evaluation guidance on current projects.

TRAINERS
Bob Flewelling and Amy Livingston from the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE)

Dr. Robert Flewelling has been a Senior Research Scientist with PIRE’s Chapel Hill Center since September of 2000, and Center Director since January 2006. His research interests and experience focus primarily on epidemiological studies of substance abuse and related health risk behaviors, evaluation of school- and community-based prevention strategies, state and community needs assessment studies, and the application of research findings to prevention system development and planning. Dr. Flewelling is currently directing a five-year evaluation of a community-based substance abuse prevention initiative in Vermont. He also leads PIRE’s subcontract with Westat on the NIDA-funded national cross-site evaluation of the Strategic Prevention Framework State Incentive Grant (SPF-SIG) initiative, is Principlal Investigator on a NIAAA-funded grant to study the effects of using different protocols for checking retailer underage alcohol sales compliance, and serves as a co-Investigator or advisor on numerous other evaluation studies.

Dr. Flewelling’s previous research experience includes positions with RTI International, the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, and the Family Research Lab at the University of New Hampshire. He received his undergraduate degree in Psychology from the University of Washington, and his Doctorate in Public Health (Health Behavior and Health Education, with a minor in Epidemiology) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he currently holds an adjunct faculty appointment.

Amy Livingston has been with PIRE since August 2008. She is the Evaluation Coordinator for Vermont’s SPF-SIG project and is based in Burlington, VT. In this role she coordinates statewide data collection efforts and works with community grantees to provide technical assistance on process and outcome data collection and implementation fidelity.

Her previous professional experience includes coordination of smoking cessation clinical trials, HIV prevention for adolescents and substance abuse prevention research at the University of Vermont. She has also coordinated community-level HIV prevention and testing programs and has worked as a health care assistant at a women’s health center.

Offered under a grant from the Vermont Department of Health, Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Programs.