Day 2 - Establishing Priorities and Anticipating Outcomes
Establishing Priorities | Long-Term Outcome Statements
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After you have completed your needs assessment and identified the main problems facing your school and community, you face a challenging task: deciding where to focus your attention and limited resources. Identifying program priorities is an often overlooked precursor to selecting suitable prevention strategies and programs.
Identifying priorities is a multi-step, collaborative process that requires critical analysis of your assessment data and a good deal of consensus-building along the way. The online event Using Existing Data in Your Needs Assessment ends with an overview of how to use needs assessment data to determine prevention priorities. This section offers a quick review of this important information so that you will be better equipped to use school and community data to drive your planning process.
Establishing Priorities Based on Data
A three-step process can be used to translate needs assessment information into priorities for your comprehensive prevention plan:
Step 1: Create an Assessment Profile
Step 2: Establish Criteria for Reviewing the Information You
Have Collected
Step 3: Set Prevention Priorities Based on Your Criteria
Step 1: Create an Assessment Profile | |
An assessment profile is a summary of needs and/or resource assessment data developed to ease interpretability of the findings. You may choose to organize your needs assessment information by type of indicator (e.g., substance use, violence), by population, or by data source. Work with your partners to create a tool that clearly and succinctly presents your results. |
Click here for tools you can use to compile the information that you have collected. |
| Try It Yourself! Activity #1 Click here if you would like some practice reviewing data, identifying problems and populations affected, and linking problems to relevant risk and protective factors. |
Step 2: Establish Criteria for Reviewing the Information You Have Collected | ||
Possible criteria include:
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Once you have organized your needs assessment findings, you will need to work with your partners to establish a system for weighing and rating their relative importance. A clear, objective set of criteria will increase the chances that your prevention activities will meet genuine needs rather than attend to the "problem of the moment" or a partner's pet concern. | |
| Having said that, realize that compiling a uniform set of criteria may be challenging. If you have convened a truly representative planning team, it will represent not only organizational diversity, but also a diversity of perspectives. Members may share a commitment to prevention and still have competing interests. Your best bet is to foresee potential areas of conflict and have data at your fingertips to offer clarity. | ||
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There are many techniques for enhancing consensus-building. Click on the icon for some suggestions. Click here to read these comments.) |
Step 3: Set Prevention Priorities Based on Your Criteria
Using the criteria that your team members have agreed upon, work with your partners to identify the most compelling pieces of information. If different data sources yield inconsistent information, you may want to go back and review the records or talk with those most familiar with the data to determine which seem most reliable.
| Click here for a tool designed to help you develop criteria and establish priorities for your prevention initiative. |
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Some Questions to Ask When Setting Prevention Priorities |
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Developing Measurable Long-Term Outcome Statements
| Once your team has decided on the priorities you want to address, create three to five outcome statements that describe, in broad terms, what you expect to accomplish through your prevention programming. You may choose to focus on a single long-term outcome or develop several different outcome statements. | "Our goals have been guided entirely by the data available." Kay Aldridge, MSC, Tucson, Arizona |
Example of a measurable outcome: Example of an outcome that is not measurable: |
When developing outcome statements, it is important to clearly define your anticipated outcomes with measurable criteria. This will provide direction for your overall prevention initiative and facilitate your ability to evaluate your progress. Long-term outcome statements should be stated in a measurable and realistic manner to enhance your potential for success. |
Consider the following questions when writing these statements:
- Who is the target group for change?
- What action or change do you expect to see?
- What is your baseline or starting point from which you will measure change?
- How much change from that baseline do you expect to see?
- By when do you expect to see this change?
- How will you measure change?
| Try It Yourself! Activity #2 Click here if you would like some practice writing a measurable long-term outcome statement. |
Long-term outcome statements that are data-driven and well-written will help you and your school-community planning team identify the strategies and programs that are most appropriate for your prevention initiative.
References
The materials in this section have been adapted from Chapter 3 of your training manual, "Key School-linked Strategies and Principles for Preventing Substance Abuse and Violence." Please visit the manual for a complete set of references.
This completes today's work. |
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