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BREAKING IT DOWN STEP BY STEP
The Guide below explains the four steps you should follow to identify, assess, and properly use indicators to evaluate your violence prevention efforts. After exploring the steps and following an example program through each of the steps, you will be ready to use the Violence Indicators Database yourself and put these steps into practice for your own work.
Develop Your Logic Model and Identify Outcomes
Identify Potential Indicators and Available Data Sources
Assess the Fit of Potential Indicators
Create a Plan to Collect, Analyze and Use Indicator Data
Sample Journey: Vetoville
Take a sample journey through the Violence Indicators Database
One of the best ways to get comfortable using the Violence Indicators Interactive Guide is to see how it has been successfully utilized with other programs. For an example, let’s take a closer look at how “Vetoville” benefited from these tools:
CDC’s Rape Prevention and Education Program (RPE), a national program that provides funding for rape prevention to state health departments in the U.S. and its territories, was seeking to develop and strengthen sexual violence prevention efforts at the local, state, and national levels. “Vetoville Health Department” received RPE funding to work collaboratively with diverse stakeholders, including state sexual violence coalitions, educational institutions, rape crisis centers, community organizations, and other state agency partners to guide implementation of their specific sexual violence prevention efforts. As part of its state-level evaluation, Vetoville went through a multi-step process to identify outcomes and indicators for its RPE program.
STEP 1: Develop Your Logic Model and Identify Outcomes
A roadmap is only useful when you know where you want to go. The Readiness Assessment Tool below will help you map out your destination, by helping you identify what questions you want to answer and which outcomes you want to change. It was designed to help violence prevention practitioners like you assess your program to determine if you are ready to select indicators and other data collection tools necessary for program evaluation.
Before you can select indicators, you have to know what questions you want to answer. If you haven’t yet developed your logic model or evaluation questions or if you discover that you aren’t quite ready to select indicators after you complete the Readiness Assessment Tool, don’t worry! You can find multiple resources right here on VetoViolence to help get you on the right path. After you developed a logic model and an evaluation plan that includes a list of evaluation questions, you can then return to this site and start exploring the indicators in the database.
Violence Prevention in Practice
Violence Prevention in Practice is a resource focused on taking action to select and implement the strategies presented in the Division of Violence Prevention’s (DVP) Resources for Action. This guidance is designed to support state and local health agencies and other stakeholders who have a role in planning, implementing, and evaluating violence prevention efforts
Principles of Prevention (POP)
POP is an online course teaching proven violence prevention strategies that can be practiced at home, in schools, and in the community at large. Participants complete interactive exercises and learn ways to mentor and nurture young people to help prevent the five types of violence.
This guide offers violence prevention professionals tools and resources to better understand how evidence guides data-based decisions for prevention efforts.
EvaluACTION is an online tool developed to help violence prevention professionals evaluate their program efforts and track their progress.
CDC uses a four-level model to illustrate the risk and protective factors that can occur in different areas of our lives. This model considers the complex interplay among individual, relationship, community, and societal factors.
This comprehensive online resource explains how everyday attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors can promote healthy relationships and safe communities.
Example from Vetoville
To begin the process, Vetoville pulled together information related to their evaluation including: the state level logic model, logic models of their sub-recipients, the RPE Notice of Funding Opportunity, and a review of literature about risk and protective factors related to sexual violence.
Vetoville’s first step was to convene a meeting of state and local stakeholders to discuss and prioritize its list of outcomes. This allowed the Vetoville health department to narrow the focus of its outcome evaluation and to ensure the priority outcomes were included. Health department staff used a narrowed list of 4 primary outcomes to complete their state-level logic model. Some examples of outcomes included: reduction in sexual violence perpetration and increases in social support, connectedness, and skills needed for healthy/respectful communication.
STEP 2: Identify Potential Indicators and Available Data Sources
Before you can identify potential indicators and available data sources, it’s important to understand some key terms.
What is an indicator?
An indicator is a documentable or measurable piece of information, from a data source, regarding some aspect of the program/strategy being evaluated.
What is an outcome indicator?
An outcome indicator measures whether the program is achieving the expected effects or changes (i.e., outcomes) in the short, intermediate, and long term (e.g., one to two years, three to five years, more than five years). Before you can select the best outcome indicator, you need to identify the right short-, intermediate-, and long-term outcomes for your program or policy.
What is a violence indicator?
A violence indicator is a measure with an empirical or theoretical link to violence. This means the indicator is supported scientifically or logically linked in some way with the violence type you are trying to prevent.
What is public data?
Public data includes data that can be obtained from an online data source that anyone can view and access in a table, report or other format. Public data have already been collected and analyzed and may be provided as raw numbers, percentages, or rates of a population.
The Violence Indicator Database will help you identify potentially appropriate indicators to use when evaluating the outcomes of your violence prevention efforts. There are numerous indicators that organizations, health departments, and other violence prevention practitioners can use to monitor and evaluate violence outcomes, including risk and protective factors. Likewise, there are many publicly available resources for indicator data.
The Violence Indicators Database includes more than 269 possible violence indicators that incorporate community and societal level prevention. You should select indicators that align with your unique circumstances, needs, and priorities; that logically relate to program activities; that identify risk and protective factors; and directly link to intended violence prevention and programmatic outcomes. Indicators should be:
- Useful to your evaluation
- Credible to stakeholders
- Feasible to track and report
- Applicable to multiple contexts
Example from Vetoville
Once it had a final list of outcomes related to violence prevention in its community, Vetoville used the Violence Indicators Database to identify potential indicators for each of the outcomes. Vetoville also reviewed any national and state-specific data sources that could provide valuable indicator data.
STEP 3: Assess the Fit of Potential Indicators
While the Violence Indicators Database will help you identify various options, you still need to assess how well potential indicators fit with your specific program needs. There are three main types of selection criteria to help you determine if an indicator is a good fit.
Indicator Inclusion Criteria - provide an initial screen to determine if the indicator is appropriate for your evaluation. The purpose is to provide an initial inclusion or exclusion determination.
Indicator Fit Criteria - help you determine if the indicator is the best fit for use in your evaluation.
Additional Selection Criteria - provide additional considerations that can help you understand the use of the data based on the context of your program.
Use the downloadable, printable selection criteria charts to help ensure that the indicators you identified using the Violence Indicator Database are appropriate for your particular program and evaluation.
Example from Vetoville
After completing Steps 1 and 2, Vetoville health department staff looked at several possible sexual violence indicators related to its outcomes, then considered the following questions:
a) Was the data available in their state and at the level they wanted?
b) How often was the data available? What was the lag in data?
c) Would the data be meaningful for both state and local level stakeholders?
Many of its outcomes could be measured in multiple ways, so Vetoville decided to select multiple indicators for many of the outcomes. Weighing all of the various options for indicator data for each outcome, the health department decided upon a final set of 10 key indicators for its 4 outcomes.
We won’t walk through all 45 indicators and 12 outcomes identified by Vetoville, but let’s take a closer look at one.
Prevention Strategy:
One component of Vetoville’s prevention strategy was to implement comprehensive sex education programs statewide in public middle and high schools to help reduce sexual violence among youth aged 10-18.
Program Timeline:
Implementation began in 2010 and ended in 2015.
Evaluation Question:
To what extent did our prevention strategy reduce sexual risk behaviors among middle and high school youth?
Proposed Indicator:
% of adolescents who did not use a condom during last sex
Data Source:
Youth Risk Behavior Survey
Data Collection Frequency:
Biennial Most Recent
Data Available:
2015
STEP 4: Create a Plan to Collect, Analyze and Use Indicator Data
Once you feel confident that you’ve selected the right indicators you can:
- Incorporate the selected indicators into your evaluation plan.
- Review your evaluation plan, including timeline and data collection activities, to determine the next appropriate steps to begin tracking indicators.
Examples of Potential Uses of Indicator Data
Planning
Monitoring Trends
Evaluation
Understanding Context
Communicating with Stakeholders
Example from Vetoville
The Vetoville health department staff created a plan for compiling and reviewing the 45 indicators on an annual basis, including a plan for analyzing the data and disseminating the data to state and local stakeholders.
CONGRATULATIONS
You are now ready to dive into the Violence Indicator Database! Remember, you can always reference this interactive guide or revisit some of the resources listed in the beginning of the site should you find you need some extra help.
Thank you for taking the time to learn more about Violence Indicators. Your work is so very important to the process of preventing violence in our communities!