Читать книгу Social Work Research Methods - Reginald O. York - Страница 79

There are two major ways we characterize an evaluative research study with regard to scope. The scope of some evaluative studies is broad, and they could be labeled as program evaluations. The scope of other evaluative studies is narrower, and they will be labeled as evaluations of interventions. More detail on this distinction will be offered in a later chapter. In this chapter, you will be given an introduction to this distinction.

A program evaluation may entail the examination of various aspects of a program. An example could be the child abuse treatment and prevention program, which has services designed to review complaints of child abuse and take necessary legal action, services designed to offer treatment for abused children or abusive caregivers, and services designed to prevent child abuse in the community. This evaluation might examine the effectiveness of the intake service in the initial assessment of complaints of child abuse, the extent to which good standards of service are being implemented, or the degree to which repeat offenses of child abuse have gone down in the past year. Each of these could be viewed as an evaluation of success.

An intervention evaluation is more narrow. An example could be your evaluation of your parent education intervention for a group of 11 parents confirmed for child abuse. You want to measure the extent to which they have increased their knowledge of good parenting practices. Another example could be your evaluation of the effectiveness of your treatment for a single abused child for the improvement of self-esteem. For each evaluation of an intervention, you have a designated client or group of clients, and you will measure each client on the same outcome measures.

You might say that your evaluation of your practice as an individual social worker is an evaluation of an intervention, while your participation in the evaluation of a major program is an example of a program evaluation. In the latter case, the outcomes are not significantly due to your own practice. This book places emphasis on the evaluation of your practice as a social worker, so we will focus more on the evaluation of interventions.