Program Evaluation Case Study
Process Evaluation Saves the Day
A school-based clinic gathered information on all its new patients, including whether they had ever had intercourse and the age at first intercourse. After these data were collected, the following findings emerged:
- 183 had reported that they had had sexual intercourse.
- 108 of these had their date of first intercourse recorded in the database.
Why were some of the data missing? Did the young people not know the answer to the question? Did they not understand the question? Did staff always ask the question? A further investigation showed that:
- 704 young people had been into the clinic three or more times and had not yet been asked whether they had ever had sexual intercourse.
How could this be? An initial meeting of the clinic staff to discuss this resulted in an argument. The pediatric nurse practitioner said it was the social worker who did not ask the questions properly, while the social worker believed it was the medical staff causing this problem.
After some time, one staff member said, "But they are so young. They will be embarrassed if I ask them about sex." If this teen pregnancy prevention program had staff members who were reluctant to talk about sex, what chance did it have for success?
Group work and staff training were chosen as the solutions for this problem, but the problem never would have been discovered if it had not been for the process evaluation.
Source: Philliber S. (1999). Building Evaluation into Your Work. In
Get Organized: A Guide To Preventing Teen Pregnancy, Volume 3: Making It Happen, ed. by Keinin T, Kuhn S, Rodgers AB, & Hutchkins J, p. 146. Washington, DC: National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. Available at
http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/get-organized99/ch16.pdf.
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For questions about this information, contact Emily S. Holder (608) 267-9170
Last updated on 2/22/2008 8:00:30 AM
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