Community-based evaluation of a coach-led violence prevention program: Implementing a program evaluation toolkit

Engaging men and boys in preventing violence against women and girls is recognized by global health organizations as a potential public health strategy. The “Coaching Boys Into Men” (CBIM) program is a evidence based program intended to alter gender norms that foster teen dating violence (TDV) and sexual violence (SV), promote positive bystander intervention and, ultimately, reduce TDV/SV perpetration.

There are multiple challenges with dissemination and implementation of evidence-based programs in communities, including evaluation of those programs in local settings. To address some of these challenges, strategies to facilitate community-based evaluation are needed to assist community partners and stakeholders to self-administer an evaluation plan and to report on the effectiveness of the program locally.

Academic partners designed an evaluation toolkit for CBIM that would provide community partners the opportunity to evaluate program effectiveness using previously tested measures, but without the expense of an external evaluator. The toolkit consist of codebooks, surveys and excel analysis tools to summarize frequencies, percentages and mean scores for athletes and coaches behavior related to knowledge and promotion of violence prevention. The evaluation toolkit was implemented in high schools in Texas through a collaboration among domestic violence prevention advocates, school staff and administration, and the research team. Piloting the toolkit in this partnership provided an opportunity to identify and adjust usability and to check the feasibility of implementing this evaluation in the context of local program implementation. Development of such easy-to-use evaluation tools to accompany evidence-based programs have the potential to enhance local implementation of programs.