Plan your evaluation methods and measures
- Pre-test your sessions
Work with members of the population to develop the group education activities through participatory approaches or focus groups. This can assist in ensuring that the sessions are conveying what is intended to be conveyed or including appropriate activities. When testing the session strategies, consider how well the information is understood as intended, whether it is clearly delivered, whether it is perceived as useful, and how well it is recalled or remembered.
- Consider your evaluation strategy
In order to determine if your group education is working, you will need to evaluate your efforts. It is important to prepare for your evaluation early on because you need to be able to assess change in your population in order to measure the impact of your education sessions.
As with all interventions, it is useful to consider process, impact and outcome evaluation. Process evaluation enables you to assess if your program is being implemented as intended. Group education interventions might include an assessment of how frequently participants attended sessions, how many people participated in the activities, or amount of exposure to intervention materials. With group education interventions, it may also be useful to assess the process used to develop and plan the group education activities. This may include an assessment of the coalition processes (e.g., decision making, conflict management) and well as specific logistics (e.g., time of meeting, adequate day care, location of meeting).
Impact evaluation enables you to determine if you are achieving your intermediate objectives. You might consider collecting information through the use of standardized surveys either face-to-face conducted at the program site, in individuals’ homes, or over the phone. These surveys might be used to assess the success of your group education intervention, measure what participants have learned (e.g., changes in knowledge or attitudes) and their satisfaction with the materials, and whether participants have increased their physical activity. In addition, you could evaluate the extent to which information was remembered over time. Participant surveys could be used to measure these factors and to assess more specific changes in knowledge, attitudes, or beliefs related to physical activity. It might also be useful to consider alternative ways of tracking behavior, for example, biological markers (e.g., release of certain chemicals), and non-obtrusive measures (e.g., pedometers to measure steps taken).
Remember it is important to focus the evaluation on the objectives of the intervention. If the objective was to increase knowledge, it is important to assess knowledge. Alternatively, if the intent was to improve attitudes about the disease, then it is important to assess attitudes. Similarly, it may be useful to assess if the group education intervention influenced readiness to change.
- Challenges to evaluating group education interventions
There are several challenges in evaluating group education interventions that should be considered:
- It can be difficult to establish causality (e.g., session five on skill building caused 25 participants to change their lifestyle behaviors). Some individuals might have changed their lifestyle behaviors on their own, while others may have been influenced by family, friends, or health care providers. Therefore, it is important to get as much information as possible about the reason for the physical activity-related behavior changes.
- Different instructors or facilitators may motivate or support participants in different ways, thereby influencing the effectiveness of the intervention protocol even if it is implemented the same way in different environments.
- Different community environments support different levels of access to facilities for physical activity that may make increasing physical activity levels more or less feasible or appealing to the participants.
- When group education is provided along with other strategies (the most effective way to create change), it is difficult to figure out which intervention strategies led to the changes that were observed in the evaluation.