This paper emerges from an evaluation conducted by the author into the impact of a community-based intervention scheme designed to reduce perceived levels of "anti-social behaviour" amongst young people living in deprived communities. Drawing from this evaluation, the paper discusses the difficulties in assessing quantifiable measures of…

Youth at risk for school failure need community and school supports to reduce the likelihood of developing delinquent behavior. This article provides an overview of community and school approaches aimed at intervening on the school-to-prison pipeline. Community and school efforts are emerging that take into account empirical evidence demonstrating…

Administrators of community-based treatment programs are increasingly being required to utilize psychometrically validated instruments to measure the effectiveness of their interventions. However, developers of psychometric measures have often failed to report strategies relevant to the administration of these measures in nontraditional settings…

This article argues with a literature review that a simplistic distinction between strong and weak evidence hinged on the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), the federal "gold standard" for generating rigorous evidence on social programs and policies, is not tenable with evaluative studies of complex, field interventions such as…

This article presents an outcome-based model for evaluating school and community programs serving at-risk adolescents, and a cost-effective technique for comparing the progress of youth receiving an intervention with youth in a pseudocontrol group. The outcomes considered most important for success were derived from the literature pertaining to…

This authoritative, highly readable reference and text is grounded in the latest knowledge on how antisocial and criminal behavior develops in youth and how it can effectively be treated. Contributors describe proven ways to reduce juvenile delinquency by targeting specific risk factors and strengthening young people's personal, family, and…

Primary prevention is a major concern in psychology, but data regarding intervention effectiveness, particularly effect sizes (ES) appear to be lacking. A thorough literature search of Psychological Abstracts, community psychology journals, and textbooks yielded 47 primary prevention articles, 22 of which were data-based, and none of which…

In the present climate of public accountability, there is increasing demand to show "what works" and what return is gained for the public from investments to improve communities. This increasing demand for accountability is being met with growing confidence in the field of philanthropy during the past 10 years that the impact or effectiveness of…

Recommendations for feasible and rigorous evaluation design formulated by a 1991 conference on the evaluation of comprehensive community interventions are summarized and illustrated through the example of a program for drug risk reduction. Implications of a multisite design with matched pairs randomized into intervention and comparison conditions…

A new technology is described that permits virtually instantaneous tracking and evaluation of community-based projects. Faxes of coded forms are automatically stored in a database for up-to-date summaries and feedback for efficient outreach and program improvement. Evaluation of a human immunovirus risk reduction program is described. (SLD)

Over the past quarter-century, evaluation researchers have recognized the importance of documenting implementation practices of programs as they are transferred from controlled to real-world settings. As programs become widely disseminated in the general population, there is a tendency for practitioners to alter programs in a manner more conducive…

Regression analysis and principal components analysis, which can be used to create perinatal risk profiles of neighborhoods within cities, were compared. Using census tract level low birthweight as the outcome variable, both methods identified factors identifying neighborhoods at risk. Both methods can be used to identify community characteristics…

High intercommunity variation in adolescent smoking precluded detection of effects of mass media campaigns on initiation of cigarette smoking in a study with a final sample of 1,637 adolescent subjects. Implications for studies using the individual as unit of analysis and the community as unit of randomization are discussed. (SLD)