When working with an evaluator, you may have been encouraged to use a “validated” survey measure in place of a tailor-made questionnaire. At first, this might seem like a strange proposition: why use a measure that wasn’t specifically developed for your program or intervention? The short answer is that validated measures have special characteristics that…
Happy new year! To kick off 2022, we wanted to bring it back to our core and remind you of our approach to evaluation and consulting. At EVALCORP our relationship with our clients comes first! One of the main priorities at EVALCORP is to provide actionable and valuable data to inform decisions. Across all evaluation…
With the end of the year quickly approaching, we often encounter folks who are stretched too thin facing numerous conflicting deadlines. So, we thought this would be the perfect opportunity to share a few time-management skills. Some of the following tips are strategies we’ve implemented and found to be effective, while others are frequently mentioned…
The global COVID-19 pandemic brought many aspects of life and work to a halt. Fortunately, many of our community partners were able to continue the good work they do but under different circumstances which meant we, as their trusted partners, had to step up and support their efforts to measure the work they do in…
EVALCORP has been a long-term partner of Waymakers of Orange County and has continually evaluated their education and prevention programs including their Impaired Driving program which after ten years, will sunset June 30, 2021. Historically this program has worked to educate both the public and retail/restaurant establishment owners, managers, and employees about responsible alcoholic beverage…
As you know from our last post, we’re in the midst of a 3-part series on empowerment evaluation. In our prior installment we introduced the basics of empowerment evaluation providing you with some of the key concepts and a big picture overview. For this post we’d like to focus a little more on one of the…
Over the last eight months we’ve gone from hearing about this virus on the other side of the world, to ravaging grocery store shelves for toilet paper, to binging Tiger King, but what might be one of the biggest shifts because of the COVID-19 pandemic may be the way we work moving forward. Offices are…
Although there may be many reasons why a client might be hesitant or resistant to evaluations, distrust of scientific research methods, in general, is one that can appear in a wide variety of political variations. Here, I want to briefly consider some issues relevant to evaluation that can be relevant from one form of distrust…
When it comes to infectious diseases, a pandemic is the worst-case scenario. When an epidemic spreads beyond a country’s borders, that’s when the disease officially becomes a pandemic. With the first cases showing up in January of this year, the Novel Coronavirus-2019 – or COVID-19 – showed early signs of an epidemic, but very few…
The importance of cultural considerations when conducting evaluations, particularly with respect to evaluations of mental health programs, has been generally accepted for some time. However, the often-used notion of “cultural competence” has some limitations. The idea of “competence” implies traditional notions of “expertise,” but culture is not like traditional bodies of knowledge – culture is…