Program Evaluation and Family Violence Research

Sally K. Ward · David Finkelhor

may 2014 · Routledge

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Understand and evaluate family violence programs for your community!Twenty years ago, the major issue in creating interventions to prevent domestic violence was persuading the courts, the funding agencies, and society that domestic violence was a serious problem worthy of time, trouble, and money. Now that the importance of domestic violence has been established, we need safe and effective ways to evaluate those interventions to see which ones are working and how they can be improved. Program Evaluation and Family Violence Research brings together some of the best minds in the field discussing such vital evaluation issues as policy implications, alternative designs for evaluation studies, and ethical concerns.This comprehensive book approaches the vexed question of evaluation with compassion as well as scientific rigor. Clearly, traditional double-blind studies and control groups are difficult to conduct when family violence is the subject; it is ethically indefensible to sit back and watch abusers hurt their mates or children when interventions are available. Yet finding usable methods of program evaluation is also essential. Program Evaluation and Family Violence Research confronts these questions and discusses practical ways to evaluate a variety of domestic violence programs.Program Evaluation and Family Violence Research draws on years of experience to address the difficult questions raised, including:

• going beyond evaluating program effectiveness to analyze why and how interventions help change behavior
• creating new research designs to adapt to the unique concerns of the family violence field
• using meta-analysis for program evaluation research
• determining the interaction between research and program results
• identifying barriers between community activists and social scientists that may impede researchProgram Evaluation and Family Violence Research offers fresh and creative ways to do program evaluations, guarantee subjects’physical and emotional safety, and make good science humane.