Improving quality assurance when implementing and evaluating an evidence-based intervention in a community setting: Safe Start Promising Approaches Initiative

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) is conducting the four-phase Safe Start Initiative to create a holistic approach to prevent and reduce the harmful effects of exposure to violence on young children by improving access to, delivery of, and quality of services to children and their families. The second phase, Safe Start Promising Approaches (SSPA), funded 15 sites to implement evidence or theory-based interventions for violence in a variety of community-based settings. The RAND Corporation is evaluating these interventions using either a randomized control or a comparison group selected on similar characteristics. The Association for the Study and Development of Community (ASDC) and the Safe Start Center are providing evaluation and program technical assistance to sites, respectively. RAND, ASDC, and the Safe Start Center collaborated to develop a continuum of quality assurance to provide sites with a range of strategies to improve the quality of their implementation based on the level of their resources and degree of rigor. Examples of how the 15 intervention programs improved their quality of implementation at each stage of the continuum are organized around four components of quality assurance (1) Standardized intervention training and materials; (2) Ongoing supervision and feedback; (3) Quality assurance monitoring; and (4) Agency/organizational support. The lessons learned are likely to inform the implementation and evaluation of other evidence-based interventions in community settings and thus improve our ability to implement, monitor, and evaluate interventions to reduce the harmful effects of exposure to violence on young children.