Program Evaluation and Family Violence Research

ISBN-13: 9780789011848 / Angielski / Twarda / 2000 / 330 str.

Sally K. Ward

Opis

Understand and evaluate family violence programs for your community

Twenty years ago, the major issue in creating interventions to prevent domestic violence was persuading the courts, the funding agencies, and society that domestic violence was a serious problem worthy of time, trouble, and money. Now that the importance of domestic violence has been established, we need safe and effective ways to evaluate those interventions to see which ones are working and how they can be improved. Program Evaluation and Family Violence Research brings together some of the best minds in the field discussing such vital evaluation issues as policy implications, alternative designs for evaluation studies, and ethical concerns.

This comprehensive book approaches the vexed question of evaluation with compassion as well as scientific rigor. Clearly, traditional double-blind studies and control groups are difficult to conduct when family violence is the subject; it is ethically indefensible to sit back and watch abusers hurt their mates or children when interventions are available. Yet finding usable methods of program evaluation is also essential. Program Evaluation and Family Violence Research confronts these questions and discusses practical ways to evaluate a variety of domestic violence programs.

Program Evaluation and Family Violence Research draws on years of experience to address the difficult questions raised, including:

• going beyond evaluating program effectiveness to analyze why and how interventions help change behavior
• creating new research designs to adapt to the unique concerns of the family violence field
• using meta-analysis for program evaluation research
• determining the interaction between research and program results
• identifying barriers between community activists and social scientists that may impede research
  
  Program Evaluation and Family Violence Research offers fresh and creative ways to do program evaluations, guarantee subjects'physical and emotional safety, and make good science humane.

Spis treści

Contents

• About the Contributors
• Introduction
• Program Evaluation and Family Violence Research
• Overviews of Research on Family Violence Interventions
• How Evaluation Research Can Help Reform and Improve the Child Welfare System
• Assessing Family Violence Interventions: Linking Programs to Research-Based Strategies
• Research Synthesis in Family Violence: The Art of Reviewing Research
• Experimental Designs and Alternatives
• What Are the Lessons of the Police Arrest Studies?
• Linking Research to Practice: Challenges and Opportunities
• Outcomes Research
• Treatment Research in Child Maltreatment: Clinical and Research Directions
• Canadian Child Welfare Outcomes Indicator Matrix: An Ecological Approach to Tracking Service Outcomes
• Evaluating Interventions in Specific Institutional Settings
• Evaluating Interventions for Children Exposed to Family Violence
• Strategies for Evaluating Dating Violence Prevention Programs
• Collaboration and Activist Issues
• Community Collaboration to Develop Research Programs in Partner Violence
• Ethical Issues in Evaluating Interventions
• Human Subject Issues in Batterer Program Evaluation
• Index
• Reference Notes Included

O autorze

Sally K. Ward, David Finkelhor