Prevention Program Development

 

This page offers a basic framework for designing primary prevention programs. While we’re starting at data collection, you can see that this process is cyclical. Data informs initial program design, and evaluation data collected during implementation is used to inform future iterations of program design and implementation.

 

  • Clearly identify the problem you’re trying to address. What exactly are you trying to prevent? What is the scope of the problem? Is anyone left out of your data? Consider who could be harmed by the way data is presented or used.  

  • Collect data about the problem. This might include reviewing existing research, assessing community needs and readiness, and/or collecting data from your community through surveys, interviews, and focus groups.  

  • Review the data to identify and select a target population for your prevention program. What does the data tell you about who is most at risk for committing this violence? Consider risk and protective factors and how you can target norms, attitudes, and values that may either increase or decrease likelihood of a behavior. 

  • A poorly defined problem—or a problem whose nuances you don't completely understand—is much more difficult to solve than a problem you have clearly defined and analyzed. The way a problem is worded and understood has a huge impact on the number, quality, and type of proposed solutions. This page in the Community Toolbox offers information about how to determine the nature of a problem and how to clarify and analyze a problem.

  • The Empowerment Evaluation Toolkit from the Ohio Domestic Violence Network provides guidance on how to conduct needs, resources, and capacity assessments. It contains many other useful tools like how to develop a logic model, plan your evaluation methods, analyze data, and present your findings.

 

Prevention staff will design and implement prevention strategies based on a set of principles, or theories, and be informed by data or research that lets us know what works and what does not work.

  • View an example of theory of change being used by Prevent Child Abuse America:  A Theory of Change for Primary Prevention in the U.S.

  • A theory of change explains the process of how a change will occur; it illustrates the relationships between actions and outcomes and how they can work together to bring about a desired change. This resource from the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape will help you understand the parts of a logic model and how to put them together to demonstrate how and why your program will achieve its goals.

  • The evaluation guide Writing SMART Objectives describes the components of a SMART objective and provides examples. The guide is a helpful tool for developing realistic and measurable objectives in your violence prevention programs.

  • Coaching Boys Into Men is a social norms program for high school coaches and athletes, reduced dating violence perpetration.

    Bringing in the Bystander is a bystander intervention program for college students that has shown positive effects on factors related to sexual violence, including participants’ beliefs that they are able and likely to intervene as engaged bystanders.

    Green Dot seeks to empower young people to intervene in their peer groups by speaking up against sexist language or behaviors that promote violence, reinforcing positive social norms, and offering help or support in situations where violence may occur or has occurred.

    Families for Safe Dates is a family-based safe dating program, designed to motivate and facilitate the conversation between adolescents and their caregivers about dating violence.

    DO YOU addresses youth violence by confronting root causes and enhancing protective factors (building resilience) to promote positive development and healthy relationships for young people age 13-16 years old.

 

When evaluation is implemented and integrated with program implementation, it can help us do every aspect of our jobs better and enable us to create deep and lasting change in our communities. Evaluation can improve effectiveness and inform decisions about future program implementation.

  • Evaluation for Improvement: A Seven-Step Empowerment Evaluation Approach places an explicit emphasis on building the evaluation capacity of individuals and organizations so that evaluation is integrated into the organization’s day-to-day management processes.

  • The Step-by-Step Guide to Evaluation: How to Become Savvy Evaluation Consumers, developed by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, offers the basics of program evaluation. The guide also includes links to evaluation resources, including theories of change, logic models, and information about secondary data sources.

  • This robust website from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has many useful tools and information about program evaluation, including information about logic models and use of indicators.

  • In this section of the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s Evaluation Toolkit, authors describe different paradigms and approaches to evaluation, including activity-based and participatory evaluation.