PLS 595 JOURNAL ENTRY 2

I met with Kevin, Alyson and Alli today to choose instruments and discuss data collection issues. Knowing that we are going to pursue a program monitoring approach vastly simplified the next steps. The essential questions I sought answers for included:

1. Who will be included in the population(s)? Parents/caregivers, child victims, MDT members, other agencies, the general public?
2. Will clients be sampled or will the entire population be polled? Will that continue in the future, or will a less-representative sampling technique be adopted later when it is more convenient?
   
3. Given those answers, which instruments will be best to use? Will data be collected through direct interviews, phone surveys, or self-administered surveys?
4. Who would best conduct the interviews or administer the surveys?
5. When would that process best occur so as to maximize usable feedback?
6. What privacy issues or issues of subject protection are there?
7. Who will enter the data?

POPULATION
After some discussion, it was decided that the including separate polls of the MDT members and parents/caregivers were essential for best practice comparisons. The question that I brought out was whether the value of the feedback that would come from child victims would exceed the opportunity cost of burdening the child with an additional interview (since that type of data collection would necessarily have to be via in-person interview). I pointed out that NOT taking the risk to invterview child victims would ignore feedback from the Center’s primary clients. That, in my mind, would be a costly mistake. After much discussion and review of the intstruments, we decided that child victims really ought to be polled since what they said could be essential to improving service delivery and fulfilling the Center’s mission. Other populations, such as those of cooperting agencies or the general public, were assumed to be beyond the resources and time available right now.

REPRESENTATION
All MDT members would be polled, of course. But what of clients? Since time is a premium, every single client will be recruited until mid-November. After that, recruiting on a time-limited quarterly or annual basis is always possible. Alternately, if the ongoing costs associated with program monitoring become too great, every fifth client, for example, could be sampled. While the Center serves over 15 Southeast counties, only New Hanover county clients, for the foreseeable future, will participate. The reason for this circumscribed population limit is that CAC certification is concerned with service to a single county. Furthermore, comparisons between urban and rural clients may be somewhat tenous since they are so qualitatively different. Lumping them together might be ill-advised. A separate poll is always possible.

INSTRUMENTS
After reviewing one-by-one the wide variety of program monitoring instruments that the DOJ evaluation manual offers, we selected the following instruments:

1. Parents/Caregivers:
   a. Family Satisfaction with CAC Services (Appendix C, page 76-77)
   b. Parent/Caregiver Questionnaire—3-Month Followup Telephone Interview
   (C-85 through 86)
2. Multi-Disciplinary Team Members: Agency Satisfaction Survey (C-11 through 13)
3. Child Victims: Child Satisfaction with CAC Services Survey (C-133)

Parents and caregivers should be interviewed twice, it was reckoned, to provide the Center with some longitudinal follow-up data that could yeild useful comparisons. Since the first survey would be conducted anonymously via a self-administered survey at the Center after initial interviews and services were rendered, it seems fair to assume that a more balanced assessment might be presented later on, given time to adjust to the experiences and digest them. This will help maximize usable feedback. On the other hand, further interviews with the child victim would probably be considerably less fruitful and, moreover, might tend to add to their stress unduly. They were ruled out.

DATA COLLECTION
In order to settle remaining issues regarding data collection, I asked Ali and Alyson to provide me with a revised flowchart of program activities such as the one provided in the evaluation manual. Based on their work, it was determined that the most efficacious time to administer the initial evaluation would be immediately after the second team meeting, before family and victim leave the Center. (A revised flowchart will be uploaded to the Basecamp soon.) Therefore, participants would have to be recruited during the initial interviews with each client. Of course, permission would have to be obtained from the non-offending parent or caregiver PRIOR to asking the child victim to participate. This is key to maintaining the trust of all parties. A script is available for this recruitment. Participation must be voluntary, of course, and strong emphasis should be placed on its anonymity.

This brings up subject protections. Subjects have the right to expect that all question and their responses to them have absolutely NO bearing on their own case and that they have the right to expect the same high-quality services either way. The responses are purely for the improvement of future service delivery. Furthermore, their private information will not be shared with any other person or agency, only their responses. Finally, if there is any objection from any party that NO participation will be assumed and that non-participation will not be penalized in any way.

In order to maintain privacy, only neutral, non-service delivering personnel will administer the evaluations. This entails also, that only Center staff, volunteers or contractors be involved in direct data collection. Volunteers and contractors, if any, will sign confidenitality agreements. No one from UNCW or any other agency will be involved. This last point is essential: NO ONE involved with direct service delivery to the clients can ethically collect the data. Not only will this ensure subject privacy, it will ensure that data collection is not skewed by interviewer effects.

Finally, I will be designing the database soon. As for data entry, Heather or some other neutral party may be available for this task. If not, I will certainly do it. We will make this determination later. Certain modification to the survey forms were discussed last. I promised to deliver those within a week or so. It is essential that data collection get underway by mid-September. That is our next milestone.