Evaluating programs engaged in healing, transformation and prevention: The pathways to prevention project and journey mapping as an evaluation tool
(2006) Evaluating programs engaged in healing, transformation and prevention: The pathways to prevention project and journey mapping as an evaluation tool.
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Abstract
The Pathways to Prevention Project is an early intervention initiative focused on the transition to school in the most disadvantaged urban area in Queensland. The Project aims to: 1) promote the capacity for children and youth to achieve their potential, 2) avoid poor outcomes in health, education, behaviour and crime, and the resultant costs to society, 3) promote positive parenting, 4) encourage healthy family relationships, 5) enhance children’s readiness for school, 6) reduce adolescent involvement in criminal activity in the longer term, 7) reduce social isolation experienced by families. The Pathways to Prevention Project involves the integration of family and preschool/school based programs and operates within a community development framework. The current paper will outline the challenges of evaluating Pathway’s Family Independence Program. The Family Independence Program offers multi-layered support consisting of five main components: 1) Group Programs 2) Ethno-specific Programs, 3) Individual & Family Support, 4) Youth Program, 5) Community Development Strategies. The multi-layered nature of the Family Independence Program and the need for an evaluation method that could capture day-to-day client milestones/achievements, led staff from Griffith University’s Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance to look ‘outside the square’ to find alternative evaluation methods. Eventually the decision to use the somewhat new and innovative method of Journey Mapping was made. Briefly, Journey Mapping is designed to evaluate programs engaged in healing, transformation and prevention through both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of client stories or ‘journeys’. It is especially suited to programs that help clients grow out of circumstances that diminish their lives and into new life contexts. It provides a way of observing, tracking, assessing and learning about a program and the growth and development of its clients (Kibel, 1999; Kibel, 2006). These characteristics made Journey Mapping highly amenable as a tool to evaluate the Family Independence Program, as did its production of numerical scores of client progress that could be collated and graphed. Hard data of this kind is often crucial to satisfy funding requirements. In this paper the Journey Mapping tool will be explained and assessed in the context of evaluating Pathway’s Family Independence Program.
| Item Type: | Other |
|---|---|
| Status: | Unpublished |
| Keywords: | Pathways to Prevention Project, Journey Mapping, Evaluation, Crime Prevention |
| Subjects: | 220000 Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts - General |
| ID Code: | 8616 |
| Deposited By: | Jeffries, Samantha |
| Deposited On: | 16 July 2007 |
| Alternative Locations: | http://www.acspri.org.au/ |
| Copyright Owner: | Copyright 2006 (The Author) |
| Additional Information: | Slides used at the conference. For more information, please refer to the Conference's website (see hypertext link) or contact the author. Author contact details: s.jeffries@qut.edu.au |