Posted: April 25th, 2025

Psychology week 2 assignment

This week you will be writing the first portion of the program evaluation report. It will be helpful to skip ahead to chapter 9 in the textbook, starting with page 220. At this point in your evaluation, you should be able to complete the introduction, which includes three sections: section 1 (The Problem), section 2 (The Program), and section 3 (The Evaluation).  In section 3, (The Evaluation), you will incorporate the goals and objectives that you discussed in the discussion this week.  

Because you are writing a report rather than a manuscript, your formatting will not follow the same sections or use the same headings as an APA-style manuscript. However, all citations and references for all sources should be in APA format.

 Complete the following readings:

• Fink, A. (2015). Evaluation fundamentals: Insights into program effectiveness, quality, and value (3rd ed.).  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

  Chapter 2:  Evaluation Questions and Evidence of Merit 

Welcome to the second week
of Program Evaluation. Just to reintroduce
myself I’m doctor Wade. We’re going to get started
even though no one’s here. I’ve been told to
stay calm about that. It’s the small class, and if you can’t make it, you’ll watch the recording. So I’m going to jump right
in as someone were here. Oh, I actually see a student. Go to see you this week.
I appreciate that. It’s good to see you
too. It’s hard to find the link to get in. Oh, really? Yeah, I wasn’t up for a while, and so I had to keep
logging in and coming back, and I went to my e mail. So I just I just kept trying, and eventually it
was there. Yeah. Caltur Alive. You were just
clicking on altura Alive? Yeah. Okay. Not sure why, but I’m glad we’re together now. Yeah. I’ve started recording, and I let everyone know
that it’s got to be okay. The weeks you can make
it, the weeks you can. I’ve been told to not worry
because it’s a small class. So I’m glad you can be here. And if you have questions, you’ll be able to
raise them that way. Okay. But I am going
to start to go through the material. I’ll go ahead and. But pop in, if you
have any questions. It’s an odd class
because what we go through is essentially your
assignment for the week. We’re building a report that you need to turn
in in week seven. Each week now
starting this week, your assignment will be
part of that report. And your discussion, which
you’ll complete before your assignment will be part of clarifying what should
go in the report. Then hopefully I can give you feedback by Thursday
or Friday, each week. Depending when you turn
in your discussion, and that should help you
finalize your report by Sunday. So what we’re going to do is remind you that this
is not an APA report. You won’t have all
the same sections that you have in the APA paper. Some of the sections
will be the same, but some will be
quite different. The idea is that this
is a report that you would give to a
board of directors of an agency you were
working for or that you would give to a
funding agency that you were trying to get money for the particular nonprofit
that you were looking at. And so it wouldn’t look like
a typical research paper. It wouldn’t look
like something in the academic world
that we would produce, like you’re typically used to at Kaiser, producing APA papers. We’ll follow the
guidelines starting in Chapter nine on page 220. Even though this course doesn’t assign Chapter nine early, it assigns it by week seven. You’ll be referring
to it throughout the semester as you work on
the varying assignments. So please look ahead to page 220 in your book as you start to do your
assignment this week. Really, you’re
going to be writing this report in about
six weeks flat because we started this week in week two and you turn
it in in Week seven. I know you started
to think about it last week and you’ve
identified your agency. But some of you are re
rolling on that and working a little harder on a second agency if the
first one didn’t work out. This is the first week you
really have to produce something for the final project. I will give you feedback
on your assignment in the next two or three
days and your discussion, hopefully by Wednesday for sure. Last week’s discussion.
This week’s discussion, I’ve got to give you
until at least Wednesday to start posting there. So what you’re going to
do this week is based on either the interview you did or the review of the
website that you did, depending if you had access
to someone to talk to, or if you just had to review
a website for an agency. You’re going to start to
write about the one or maybe two services that you would evaluate
for effectiveness. The whole goal of
program evaluation is to see how effective the agency is at the outcomes they’re
interested in doing, they’re interested
in these treatments. How did the outcomes work out? Are they effective or not? The very first thing
you’re going to do this week is your discussion. Again, based on the information you obtained from
your interview with a key personnel or at the agency last week or the evaluation you
did of the website, you’re going to identify
one or two areas of service to evaluate
for effectiveness. Although the agency may
offer many services, keep in mind that this
course is very brief, a total of eight
weeks, but again, you’ll be getting
this project done and about five or six weeks. Therefore, just one or maybe two key services
should be selected. You don’t have to
choose the second one, but if you feel like in
the flow of your work, that’s what you want to do,
then you’re welcome to it. What will you do this week? You’ll do parts A, B, C, and D of the discussion. You’ll explain the following for each service that
you’ll evaluate. Again, probably one
service, maybe two. Um, so based on that, you’ll set out to talk about
what program goals you have? That is, what is
the purpose that the service is providing, right? Is the service trying to
reduce mental health symptoms? Is the program or agency trying
to reduce substance use? Is it trying to increase educational attainment
or passing the GED? What are the outcomes
that are important? What is the program
goal for the agency? You might pick a secondary goal. Maybe if you’ve
seen a reduction in mental health symptoms or a
reduction in substance use, you’d secondarily look at a goal like family engagement
or family involvement, or employment or
something like that. But primarily,
you’re interested in the reduction of these symptoms
or the reduction of use, or maybe if we’re looking
for increases in education, GED, pursuing higher
Ed, et cetera. The primary goal is the
reduction of something. A secondary goal might be on
the level of functioning. Again, functioning
well within a family, functioning well within
an employment situation. The first goal or part A of the discussion is to
identify that program goal. What are you trying to see if the agency is
effective at doing? Are the effective at reducing
mental health symptoms? Are they effective at
reducing substance use, increasing education, increasing foster
placement, your name. Then we look at part B,
the evaluation question. Now you’re going to restate the goal in terms of
a research question. Your research question may be, is X Y Z agency, effective in significantly
reducing the symptoms in their clients or reducing
substance use in their clients or increasing educational
attainment in their clients. The evaluation question is a restatement of the goal
in terms of a question. We’re going to get into what
measurements you might use? If you’re interested,
for example, in substance use, you’ll
probably use something from NTA. If you’re interested in mental health reduction,
symptom reduction, you’ll look at either
mood disorders or anxiety or whatever your
agency mostly treats. Okay. The key here is that
you’re going to want to see, is there an effectiveness? Is there a change between the intake value and
the discharge value? Are their symptoms higher significantly when they come
in, then when they leave? Is their substance use higher
when they come in at intake than when they leave at
discharge? The reverse. If you’re looking at something
in the education realm, are they doing better off
at discharge in terms of educational attainment
than they were at intake? If you’re looking at
a inpatient agency, some rehabilitation
or detox program where they come in and they have no access to substance abuse or substances while they’re in the agency. Then you’re going
to want to look not just at intake and discharge, but probably something more like intake and six months
after they leave. Six months after discharge. But we’ll talk more about that when we get to measurement. One of the notes I
want to make here is that week five is going to be a particularly
heavy week of work. It’s when you’re going
to make up the data. We’re not going to
actually collect the data, as I said last week. You’re going to have
to make up the data. And so as I’ll note a
couple of times tonight, Week five is a particularly
busy part of the course. But back to this program
evaluation question, this is going to
tell us whether what the administration is
doing is effective or not. So the program
evaluator, that’s us. We’re the ones
hired to come in to be the program evaluators, we’ll tell the administration what measures we
want them to assess. But we won’t do the
assessment ourselves. The assessment will
be done by if this were a real project and we
were really collecting data. The program evaluator would tell the administration
what to assess. Then we would deal
with the data. So we’d let them
collect the data? We would assess the data. Again, because we’re not doing
this project in reality, we’re just making it
up, I want to be clear about what our role
would be at each stage. We tell them what
they should be doing, but they do the
administration piece of it. We’re the research designer, but not the collector. Okay. Any questions
on A or B so far? And I know that puts all the
pressure on one student, but I’ll just keep going
unless I see a question. Well, I do have a slight
question because as you know, I’ve had to change my agency Ag So I think maybe I
should wait till at the end because the
agency I the input and outcome of the evaluation is going to be a
little bit different. Well, the e the
research question is going to be
completely different. Because you’re still using
the same agency and just not talking to them or because you’re using a brand new agency. Brand new agency. I
actually worked for a nonprofit and decided,
well, you know what? I’ll just go with
that. Yes. Yes. Didn’t know what is the goal that you’re going to measure the effectiveness of? Well, it’s most
likely depression. It’s a nonprofit for hospice. So I thought it would be a
little bit difficult with the input and
output, the results. But is that one of the aims of hospice
to reduce depression? In the families, yes. In the family members. Okay. So your unit of measurement won’t be the person who’s
actually in hospice, but in the caregivers. Right. But I was looking at a specific program with the
Veterans Administration. They have other programming. So that’s Yes. Maybe I’m going to kind of trail off into a
specific programming. I want to be very specific here. Yes. More specific you
can be the better. And so if it’s with
veterans families, reductions of
depression, is that something they already measure or that you would
wish to measure? They already measure. I’m
trying to get as detailed as possible because
it can go really big. That’s it initially. Yeah. So that’s why I figured, You know what? I’m
going to Yeah. Let’s just really,
really narrow it. Yeah. But I that the information to you by in our assignment. I’m like, put it together, and we’ll see how it goes. Okay. So between the
discussion and the assignment, when we talked yesterday
briefly on e mail, you went in the new direction
for your assignment. Yeah, very great. Great. Okay. And I will
give feedback on that. And I do agree, the more specific you
can go, the better. Yeah. It was a
fear. It’s a fear. I get it. I get it. All right. So we’re good on A and B, at least in terms of
what you know you need to do. Yeah. It’s clear. Okay. Let me move on to C then. Here you’re going to provide what evidence you’re
going to present. What is the standard
that must be reached in order to demonstrate that the
goal has been accomplished? What is the standard? Well,
in the example you just used, it would be a
significant reduction in mental health symptoms
for a caregiver. That would be the standard, significant reduction in
symptoms for a caregiver. For others of you, it could be significant reduction
in substance use. Again, at intake
and at discharge, or if it’s inpatient, then it would be at intake and at maybe six months
post discharge. Um If you were working
in an education setting, maybe it would be a
significant increase in the education attained. What standard would have to be reached between intake
measurement and the discharge measurement
for you to have evidence that demonstrated the goal had been accomplished. Finally, data collection, without yet talking
about the measure. I know this is a little fuzzy, but we have to introduce this in a way in our discussion
that we’re starting to make sense of
what we’re trying to do before we narrow
down that measurement. Here, for data collection, we ask ourselves, what
variable or variables, but we want to stay
as few as possible, need to be measured in order
to provide the evidence. So if we’re looking at
reduction of depression, we would need to
measure the variable of depression in the caregiver in the case that
Lanette just used. So for mental health, you’d want to be as specific as possible if you’re studying
anxiety reduction. Or specific as
possible if you’re studying mood
disorder reduction. If you need some
broader symptoms like mental health
symptoms generally, we’re going to want to
look at broader measures. Here’s where you’re trying to really scale things to
the appropriate place. If, for example, you
were looking at trauma, You’d want to look at a
measure of PTSD, right? And therefore, if
you wanted to see a reduction in PTSD from
intake to discharge, then the data collection
would have to be around the variable of PTSD, right? It’s all, I know, very
small and incremental. Okay, I just said this in C, it seems like, but in D, we’re really specifying, right? So, essentially,
you want to really gear your assessment to
what the program treats, to what outcomes the
program is interested in. That’s your discussion
for the week. Remember to support
your discussion with at least two scholarly sources that focus on evidence
based practice in social service agencies. You want to go out
there and do research. Yes, Fink can be one of
your scholarly sources, but we’d like to
get beyond that. Fink being our textbook author. It’s really pretty easy to
Google search and to go into our library proquest
and other kinds of searches to look at social
service agencies specifically, evidence based practice, to say, here’s the reason why
we want to collect data that looks for evidence
about the program’s goals, because that’s what agencies do. And we cite in a
source that says, this is what agencies do. They go out there. They have a goal to see that their
treatment is effective. They gather evidence
about that after posing a research question
and they collect data specific to the
evidence they want to have. Don’t forget those two
scholarly sources. They can come up
either in your first or in your response
in the discussion, but at least one in
your initial posting. You should have at least
one scholarly source there, and then in follow ups, you could put another one
if you didn’t fit two in. But I think you’ll fit
two in quite easily. Now we move on to
the assignment. And this assignment
is going to be the first part of what you
turn in in Week seven. What we’re going to
do is we’re going to build your report in Weeks two, three, four, five, and six. You’re going to get feedback on that portion of the report. You’re going to fix
it up a little, and then in week seven, you’ll present it as a finished product with all
the sections put together. So you’ll be writing
the first portion of the program
evaluation report. Again, it’ll be helpful to skip ahead to Chapter nine
in the textbook, starting with page 220. I’m talking about the
electronic version, but I’m pretty sure
the page numbers map on if you’re not using
the electronic version. At this point in
your evaluation, you should be able to
complete the introduction, which includes three sections, and I’m going to talk about
each of those sections now. Section one will be the problem. Section two will be the program, and Section three, which is only going to be
one sentence long, will be the evaluation. In Section three, you’ll
incorporate the goals and objectives that you discussed in the discussion this week. There’s a reason we do
the discussion first. It’s a clarifying assignment, and then you’ll go into
the report production. Here’s what you’ll do. You’ll
start with a title for your report and that title
should be pretty simple. It should simply say
program evaluation of XYZ agency or the name of the agency, Colon
program evaluation. One of those two titles, program evaluation
of XYZ agency. That should be
centered and bolded. Then you should move on to or that should be done
as a title page, me. That should be done
as a title page. That’s why you would
include information like your name, the
program you’re in, the university you
affiliated with, a typical title page. Then you move on
to the second page of the report and you
start with introduction. In this case, we’re actually going to use the
word introduction. After all the years
you’ve been trained, don’t use the word
introduction in an APA paper. This isn’t an APA paper. We are going to use
APA style citations and an APA style reference page. But otherwise, it’s not
an APA style paper, it’s not an academic paper. You’ll use the word introduction and you’ll center and bold that. And then you’ll describe the
agency to us to me, I guess. Describe the agency by saying XYZ agency is
located in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, houses 100 homeless individuals
and ten families. I’m going back to
the Broward report that we used last week, the PowerPoint example
that was provided. You can say they provide
A B and C services, and this program
evaluation will provide or assess the effectiveness
of and then you say. What are you going to assess? You’re going to assess,
maybe in the case that we just we’re talking about,
mental health treatment, programs at the agency, or depression reduction in hospice as laid out by Lanette. Then you go into Section
one called the problem. Your introduction is going
to have three sections. Section one is
called the problem. I would justify the problem
and maybe underline it. Again, this is not APA style, but we want to have some
technical organization to it. The problem essentially
is why we should care about this
program evaluation. And why is it important, right? Why should we care about
the work of the agency? Justify the agency,
explain its importance. This report is probably
going to go to funders to people who want to make decisions about what agencies are
worthy of their money. And so the first thing
you have to do is say, you know, this is a
really prevalent problem. Homelessness in Fort Lauderdale, depression among
veterans in Hospice, or among the caregivers
for veterans in Hospice. You can get information on
this prevalence from websites, like the agency you work for. But even better is if
you can back it up by folks like the Centers
for Disease Control, the CDC, the National
Institute of Mental Health, NIMH, the National Institutes
of Health, NIH, NTA, the National Institute
for Drug addiction, So NIMH, NIH, NTA, the CDC, these are the kinds
of places you can go for some data on the prevalence of the problem that the agency
is trying to address. What are the implications
or outcomes if we don’t address what this
agency helps with, right? If depression continues in
this group of individuals, what are the
likelihoods of suicide? What are the likelihoods
of broken families of substance abuse,
of job issues? You can make the case that this is a very
prevalent problem, and if we don’t address it, there are these outcomes
that are quite serious. You probably will only need about one or two paragraphs for that section on the problem, one or two paragraphs. Then you move on to the
program, Section two. You might have one or
two paragraphs here, possibly three paragraphs, but program evaluation reports
are about being concise. The more you can pack into the fewer sentences, the better. Okay? Here, again, you’re going to give the
justification for something. But here it’s the
justification for the type of treatment that the
agency engages in. What is the solution or the predictive best answer for the problem you’ve
just described. Now that you’re
describing the program, you want to be specific. You want to say there’s
research evidence for the effectiveness of this
treatment for this population. We know that by using X program, we reduce y symptoms
among z population. You want to demonstrate
that the treatment is really the treatment excuse me, that the agency is providing
is very effective. You want to show from
the research literature that the treatment that the agency is providing is very effective and
evidence based, effective and evidence based? What does the organization use? Does it use cognitive
behavioral therapy? Does it use an eclectic
form of therapy? Does it what’s out there for it to be
saying that it uses? Then what evidence is there
in the literature that that’s effective for the symptoms
they’re trying to reduce? Then we move on
to Section three, which is the evaluation, literally, this is going
to be one sentence long. Here you’ll incorporate
the goals and objectives that you discussed in the discussion this week. I’m going to read a
sentence to you that’s going to be very familiar
in all your papers. This is the sentence I
expect to see pretty much in the evaluation section, which again, you left justify, you underline just as
you did for the program, and you did for the problem. That sentence should read
something like this. This program evaluation
will demonstrate the effectiveness of X Y Z program treatment
by determining, and I’ll repeat this sentence. If there is significant
reduction in A B and C symptoms, we’re going to stick
with one symptom, maybe two by certain dates, and those dates would be the intake time and
the discharge time, or the intake time and six
months after discharge. You go back to the program goal. You stated in your discussion, and you write a
sentence like this. This program evaluation
will demonstrate the effectiveness of XYZ’s
program treatment by determining if there is a
significant reduction in ABC symptoms by the dates of intake and discharge or six months apart at
intake and discharge. If it’s not a significant
reduction you’re looking for, but a significant increase like foster assignment or
educational attainment, then you, of course, don’t want to say
significant reduction, you want to say
significant increase. Again, the discussion
leads to the assignment. The assignment will be
maybe a page and a half, two pages double
spaced at the most. Because remember, you
have many sections to write, and at
the end of this, we don’t want the report to be any longer than 15 or 16 pages. It’s very important when you reach out to a funding agency, when you communicate
with the board of directions, that you’re concise, that you don’t go on
and on and on and on, but here we go, the problem, the program, the evidence, et ce Excuse me, the evaluation, and so on. Be concise. If
you’re looking for a few more details about what this project is going to be and how you’re
going to do it, we are going to have
about 100 participants in our fake data in
our made up data. But I will explain through
several videos how to do that. For example, you’ll
probably only have to make up about
ten rows of data, and then we’ll show
you how to copy that ten rows nine more times. You won’t be hand entering
100 rows of data, rather, you’ll be
entering ten rows of data and then copying
them nine more times. You are going to turn in a
separate document each week. As you’re building this report, I don’t want to see
this week’s work attached to next week’s work. I just want to see this
week’s work for this week, next week’s work for next week. Week four’s work, in week four, and so on, until week seven when you’ll put
the whole thing together. One thing that you
could have running along each time is the
references section. If you provide references this week and you start to
build your references section, and then you have more and you will have more
references next week, you can just add that into
the references section, And I’ll try to remember, not to say something like, Oh, you cited something that you didn’t have in your
writing this week, you know, because then
you’ll want to say, Well, I had it in the
writing last week. But I want you to
probably keep building that references
section as you go so that it’s nicely
organized and alphabetized, and all those things are
done well by the end. I don’t want you to have to
sort of cut and paste later. But all the other sections
should be handed in separately each week and
then compiled in week seven. Speaking of seven,
remember to use the seventh edition
of the APA manual. That’s what was listed
in the syllabus, but there were a few changes between Addition six
and addition seven, like when you use
and this thing. Make sure you’re using
the seventh edition. It’s what you’ll use
for your dissertation. The more familiar
you can become with that the better. Okay. Any questions to put
this on Lynette again? Is this clear for this week, or do you need a
little more time talking about your project? I think it’s clear
for this week. I just have to kind of make sure I have
everything in order. And narrowed down. Yeah, because it was
still last minute. Yeah. That’s tough.
But fortunately, you work for an agency, and I know it’s a big one, and it has a lot of aims. But I think if you narrow
it down and you focus on what’s asked for each
week, you’ll be okay. Yeah. Yeah,
absolutely. Thank you. To get ahead of
yourself. Thanks for being here tonight.
I appreciate it. Okay. Thank you. You. You too. Bye bye. Bye bye.

3

Week 2 Discussion Evaluation

Student Name

Institution

Course Name

Instructor

Date

Patients’ experiences in community mental health hospitals have continued to deteriorate, and many people in the community are reporting increased difficulties in accessing these services (Torjesen, 2022). Based on the information obtained from the interview with key personnel at the agency last week, Mental Health America offers various range of services to improve mental health involves numerous services such as promoting community support and well-being, reducing stigma, and increasing access to mental healthcare. This week, two areas of focus that I will evaluate for effectiveness in the agency will be increasing access to mental health and reducing stigma.

1.
Reducing Stigma

Program Goal: The goal of this program is to ensure that the agency focuses on mental health stigma reduction, this will be achieved by fostering an inclusive community environment and educating members of the public.

Evaluation Question: To what degree do MHA’s educational initiatives impact the reduction of mental health stigma and discrimination in the community?

Evidence: According to Colizzi et al. (2020) prevention, promotion, and early intervention strategies on mental health have a significant impact on the well-being and health of the people in the community. Therefore, the success of this program will be demonstrated I post-intervention research shows that there is a significant reduction in stereotypes, and misconceptions about mental health when compared to the data before the program.

Data Collection: To effectively evaluate the success of the program, data on variables such as attitudes toward mental health patients and rates of stigma pre- and post-intervention will be key.

2.
Increasing Mental Healthcare Access

Program Goal: The goal of this program will be to improve access to mental healthcare services for populations that have limited access by removing systemic, financial, and geographic barriers that prevent them from accessing the care.

Evaluation Question: How much does MHA contribute to improving access to mental health services for hard-to-reach populations?

Evidence: The program will measure improvement in mental health access, the success of this program will be demonstrated through the change in numbers, an increase in mental health access among the minority and underserved populations and a reduction in the amount of time they spend waiting will be a crucial measure of success.

Data Collection: Various variables will be crucial in highlighting the desired changes, these variables include several referrals made compared to those that were fulfilled within a specific time, rates of utilization of the service, and demographics of the mental health patients.

Generally, when collecting client data for both services, you should be mindful of maintaining confidentiality and obtaining informed consent as stated in the ethical standards. The evaluation process can be based on the guidelines for evidence-based practices in program evaluation provided by Fink (2015) and used in the current study. Stigma reduction and access enhancement are two of the main goals of MHA and it is important to appreciate the extent to which MHA is achieving these goals. The evaluation will be evidence-based and outcomes-based with case measurement of change in attitude within the target population or community and the effective rates of utilization of the services offered. Ethical standards such as the guarantee of confidentiality and informed consent will be used to ensure privacy.

References

Colizzi, M., Lasalvia, A., & Ruggeri, M. (2020). Prevention and early intervention in youth mental health: is it time for a multidisciplinary and trans-diagnostic model for care? 
International journal of mental health systems, 
14, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13033-020-00356-9

Fink, A. (2015). Evaluation fundamentals: Insights into program effectiveness, quality, and value (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Torjesen, I. (2022). Access to community mental health services continues to deteriorate, survey finds. 
BMJ: British Medical Journal (Online), 
379, o2585. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.o2585