Evaluation

This week we talked about the importance of evaluation. I agree with what Liz said in class: "It's worse to have a bad intervention, than no intervention at all." If your intervention isn't doing what it's supposed to do, then why put the time, money and effort into it? But how do you know if it's a "bad intervention?" Evaluation!

If you think about it, you need evaluation results to see if what you are doing works, prove the method works or doesn't work, develop and advise future projects, show key stakeholder what you have accomplished, and make notes on what, if anything, you need to change as you carry out the process. What surprised me was what I learned about the D.A.R.E. program. My school took part in that program when I was in elementary school, and I recently learned after evaulating the program, researchers found that it did not have a positive effect on its target population. This program was widely used, and if they had pilot tested the program or evaluated as they went along, they would not have ended up putting so much time and resources for this program. It's rather unfortunate.

The big take away message from this lecture is that evaluation is extremely necessary! Regardless of if the program/intervention is working or not because researchers, consumers, stakeholder, etc. should know if what they are investing in will give the biggest bang for the buck!