Evaluation and program planning
-
Cultural competence has long been valued in home visitation, with a special focus on adapting home visiting programs to maximize their effects on specific cultures and populations. Critics advocate that traditional cultural competence training focusing on individual, professional skills-building should be replaced by cultural humility approaches that focus on humble engagement of participants. Little is known about how home visiting programs serving broadly diverse populations experience cultural competence and/or cultural humility efforts and initiatives on the ground. ⋯ Two themes were identified from interviews. Respondents emphasized that: 1) cultural competency training was required by home visiting program models, so cultural competency questions were always addressed in home visitation, especially in training for new home visitors; and 2) cultural competence also included many aspects of cultural humility, commitment to continuous self-evaluation and self-reflection on cultural encounters that identified cultural knowledge gaps and sought more information. Respondents did not see cultural competency and cultural humility as oppositional and saw both concepts as important for engaging participants in home visitation.
-
While health equity is central to health impact assessment [HIA], in reality, less is known about potential impacts of equity-free HIA on social inequalities. We assessed equity-free HIA case in a small city east of Montreal, which took place in a context of urban revitalization. ⋯ Our results pointed to gentrification process with a gradual relocation of low-income residents in the end. To mitigate mediating circumstances of gentrification and displacement, the municipality should support social housing or at least should ensure rent stabilization ordinance.
-
This article argues that evaluators could better deal with unintended consequences if they improved their methods of systematically and methodically combining empirical data collection and model building over the life cycle of an evaluation. This process would be helpful because it can increase the timespan from when the need for a change in methodology is first suspected to the time when the new element of the methodology is operational. ⋯ Following will be a discussion of various issues that are relevant to model development and revision. What is the relevance of complex system behavior for understanding predictable and unpredictable unintended consequences, and the methods needed to deal with them? How might understanding of unintended consequences be improved with an appreciation of generic patterns of change that are independent of any particular program or change effort? What are the social and organizational dynamics that make it rational and adaptive to design programs around single-outcome solutions to multi-dimensional problems? How does cognitive bias affect our ability to identify likely program outcomes? Why is it hard to discern change as a result of programs being embedded in multi-component, continually fluctuating, settings? The last part of the paper outlines a process for actualizing systematic iteration between model and methodology, and concludes with a set of research questions that speak to how the model/data process can be made efficient and effective.
-
Multicenter Study
Conceptualizing trust in community-academic research partnerships using concept mapping approach: A multi-CTSA study.
Collaborations between communities, healthcare practices and academic institutions are a strategy to address health disparities. Trust is critical in the development and maintaining of effective collaborations. The aim of this pilot study was to engage stakeholders in defining determinants of trust in community academic research partnerships and to develop a framework for measuring trust. ⋯ Results from this study contribute to an increasing empirical body of work to better understand and improve the underlying factors that contribute to building and sustaining trust in community academic research partnerships.
-
The following critical essay on the social return on investment (SROI) methodology is broken into two parts. In the first section, focusing on the categorization dynamics of the SROI, I review a set of methodological and ethical tensions surrounding the SROI, using examples from my own work and other published works using SROI. ⋯ In the second section, focusing on the legitimation dynamics, I define a narrow scope for where, despite the aforementioned pitfalls, that the SROI can be quite effective in building a rhetorical argument for directing material resources. The essay argues that despite ongoing methodological challenges, the investor lens and market logic undergirding the metric provide a powerful frame for persuasion that can be used to construct worthiness and value creation for constituents not already constructed as such.