ABSTRACT
Single-case designs are typically used in classroom and clinical settings to assess the behavioral impacts of an intervention with an individual child. Using two illustrative case studies, this article describes the extension of this model to home-visitation programs serving tribal communities and examines the lessons learned throughout the process of adapting this approach. Our experience suggests that the benefits of using this design outweigh the associated challenges and allows researchers to expand the use of single-case designs to previously unexplored settings. Specifically, some of the benefits discussed include allowing for evaluative rigor in contexts with small samples, allowing everyone who qualifies to immediately participate, providing visual representations of the outcome-making the results more tangible and accessible to a broader audience, and allowing for a deep level of cultural sensitivity. The article also provides some general guidelines to address the practical challenges one may face when attempting to use single-case designs in novel ways within nonschool settings.
Subject(s)
Child Health Services , Culturally Competent Care/methods , Health Services, Indigenous , House Calls , Maternal Health Services , Research Design , Adult , Alaska , Child, Preschool , Female , Humans , Indians, North American , Infant , Infant, Newborn , Male , Needs Assessment , New Mexico , Pregnancy , Washington , Young AdultABSTRACT
In this article, Tribal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) grantees share strategies they have developed and adopted to address the most common barriers to effective measurement (and thus to effective evaluation) encountered in the course of implementation and evaluation of their home-visiting programs. We identify key challenges in measuring outcomes in Tribal MIECHV Programs and provide practical examples of various strategies used to address these challenges within diverse American Indian and Alaska Native cultural and contextual settings. Notably, high-quality community engagement is a consistent thread throughout these strategies and fundamental to successful measurement in these communities. These strategies and practices reflect the experiences and innovative solutions of practitioners working on the ground to deliver and evaluate intervention programs to tribal communities. They may serve as models for getting high-quality data to inform intervention while working within the constraints and requirements of program funding. The utility of these practical solutions extends beyond the Tribal MIECHV grantees and offers the potential to inform a broad array of intervention evaluation efforts in tribal and other community contexts.
Subject(s)
Child Health Services , Culturally Competent Care/methods , Health Services, Indigenous , House Calls , Maternal Health Services , Adult , Alaska , Child, Preschool , Female , Humans , Indians, North American , Infant , Infant, Newborn , Male , Needs Assessment , New Mexico , Pregnancy , Washington , Young AdultABSTRACT
A number of studies have demonstrated the efficacy of environmental change strategies (ECS) in effecting community-level change on attitudes and behaviors related to underage drinking (Treno and Lee in Alcohol Res Health 26:35-40, 2002; Birckmayer et al. in J Drug Educ 34(2):121-153, 2004). Primary data collection to inform the design of these strategies, however, can be resource intensive and exceed the capacity of community stakeholders. This study describes the participatory planning and implementation of community-level surveys in 12 diverse communities in the state of Washington. These surveys were conducted through collaborations among community volunteers and evaluation experts assigned to each community. The surveys were driven by communities' prevention planning needs and interests; constructed from collections of existing, field-tested items and scales; implemented by community members; analyzed by evaluation staff; and used in the design of ECS by community-level leaders and prevention practitioners. The communities varied in the content of their surveys, in their sampling approaches and in their data collection methods. Although these surveys were not conducted using traditional rigorous population survey methodology, they were done within limited resources, and the participatory nature of these activities strengthened the communities' commitment to using their results in the planning of their environmental change strategies.
