Components of Process Evaluation

Posted by nnlmneo on June 12th, 2015 Posted in: Blog

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At the American Evaluation Association Summer Institute, Laura Linnan, Director of the Carolina Collaborative for Research on Work & Health at UNC Gillings School of Public Health, did a workshop entitled Process Evaluation: What You Need to Know and How to Get Started. According to the CDC, process evaluation is the systematic collection of information on a program’s inputs, activities, and outputs, as well as the program’s context and other key characteristics.

Process evaluation looks at the specific activities that take place during an outreach project to ensure that planned interventions are carried out equally at all sites and with all participants, to explain why successes happen or do not happen, and to understand the relationships between the project components. Process evaluation can be extremely important in making adjustments to ensure the project’s success, and determining how or whether to do a project again.

In the workshop I attended, Linnan walked through the details covered in Chapter 1 of the book Process Evaluation for Public Health Interventions and Research by Laura Linnan and Allan Steckler. This chapter presents an overview of process evaluation methods. In it, they define a set of terms that describe the components of process evaluation (Table 1.1). These components are valuable to understand, because evaluators can look in detail at each component to determine which ones should be evaluated.

1. Context
2. Reach
3. Dose delivered
4. Dose received
5. Fidelity
6. Implementation
7. Recruitment

In addition, the authors describe a step-by-step process for designing and implementing process evaluation in a flow chart shown in Figure 1.1, including: creating an inventory of process objectives; reaching consensus on process evaluation questions to be answered; creating measurement tools to assess process objectives; analyzing data; and creating user-friendly reports. And as a final note, Linnan and Steckler recommend that stakeholders be involved in every aspect of this process.