About the Program
The program addressed by this evaluation proposal is a Parent, Teacher, and Youth Mediation Program for teenagers. It is designed to minimize conflict between children and their parents and improve their communication. The target recipients of the program are school children aged between 12 and 16 who express the signs of conflicting communication with their parents and teachers, which negatively impact their academic performance and behavior. The program is designed to mitigate conflicts and improve family functioning for better teenagers’ school and personal communication outcomes (Tucker, Edelen, & Huang, 2017). The program is a ten-hour group intervention that will last for five weeks with one two-hour group session per week. Also, a six- and twelve-week post-intervention evaluation is planned.
Evaluation Questions
Two sets of evaluation questions are sought to be answered with the help of data collection and interpretation. Firstly, the parent-child communication quality will be evaluated within the framework of the characteristics of their relationships and the ability to manage the conflicting situation. Secondly, the teacher-student relationships will be evaluated with the aim of identifying the character of their interaction. Overall, the data collection is anticipated to contribute to the scope of information about a group of teenagers and the quality of their relationships with parents and teachers. Therefore, the evaluation questions include the following: To what extent the parent-teenager relationships have improved after the intervention in comparison to the ones before the program. To what extent the teacher-teenager relationships have improved after the intervention in comparison to the ones before the program.
Data Collection & Sampling
To answer the previously stated evaluation questions, specific data indicating the quality of child-parent or child-teacher relationships will be collected. At the program level, the data on personal information necessary for the identification of a client, their relationship with a child, the problems they face, and the reasons they seek social services’ support will be aggregated. Self-report measurement instruments will be used; interviews with social workers working with the group will be required to ensure the validity of the data provided by self-report instruments (Grinell, Gabor, & Unrau, 2016). New data will be collected from the key sources of data. They will include the parents of teenagers and teachers. The collection of data from these participants will allow for obtaining necessary measurable indicators of improvement or change in relationships and identify the achievement of each of the two program evaluation objectives.
Parents will receive information about the available program in the form of a pamphlet and will have an opportunity to be sampled and recruited for the program (Jalling et al., 2016). The following interviews will be conducted over the phone to collect information for inclusion. The utilization of nonprobability sampling, purposive sampling, in particular, is justified by the necessity to allocate participants whose characteristics comply with the objectives of the program (Grinell, Gabor, & Unrau, 2016). The population will be a sample in case they are considered “good data sources based on … theoretical criteria” (Grinell, Gabor, & Unrau, 2016, p. 411). In other words, the teenagers and their parents will be recruited for the program in case if their relationship is impacted by conflict, and they demonstrate a justified need for social services. The size of the sample will depend on the number of practitioners and their caseload (Grinell, Gabor, & Unrau, 2016). For this program, three practitioners will be able to work with ten parent-child cases. Therefore, the sample will not include all the potential participants, but thirty of those whose characteristics will comply with the program requirements and objectives.
The program outcomes will be measured with the help of the Child-Parent Relationship Scale (CPRS), and the Student-Teacher Relationship Scale (STRS) designed specifically for evaluating the quality of relationships between a parent and a child or a teacher and a child, respectively, as reflected on by the participants. These measurement instruments are self-report ones and rely solely on the participants’ perception of the effects of the interventions. The psychometric properties of these tests allow for assuming their reliability in the given circumstances when the relationships between individuals might be interpreted by the participants individually (Escalante-Barrios et al., 2020). The questions asked in the questionnaires interrogate the clients concerning the level of trust, comfort, safety, and effectiveness of their relationships with a child. The extent to which they either agree or disagree with the statements is represented by points on a scale from one to five. Such a tool is valuable, measurable data, the changes in which might be easily detected by means of coefficient estimates (Escalante-Barrios et al., 2020). Thus, the identified scales will provide a reliable basis for program outcomes evaluation.
The data will be collected individually from each parent and teacher on a regular basis. The measuring instruments will be given for completion before the first session, after the third-week session, after the fifth-week session, six weeks, and twelve weeks after the program. Such a frequency of data collection will allow for obtaining necessary information before and after to compare the achieved results. Also, since the data will be collected during the program, it will help to trace the progress and make some adjustments in terms of the content and interventions within the program. Since the program deals with the improvement of parent-child relationships with a focus on teenagers’ outcomes, it is important to ensure the effectiveness of the acquired communication and conflict management skills for the student (Patel, 2019). Thus, the main sources of information should provide data on a regular basis.
Apart from the main data collection tools, other data demonstrating the practical characteristics of the interventions might be required. Other kinds of information that will contribute to the consistent evaluation of the program include attendance, involvement, and feedback on the effectiveness of the interventions (Grinell, Gabor, & Unrau, 2016). Easy-to-fill questionnaires with blocks to respond to about the perceived effectiveness of the session will be given to all the participants after each session to trace the progress and identify particular clients who face difficulties or struggle to comply with the program interventions. An attendance and involvement chart filled in by the practitioners will contribute to the evaluating process and the detecting of participants who require specific attention (Grinell, Gabor, & Unrau, 2016). This system of data collection will help to answer the evaluation questions by ensuring that all the interventions are well-documented and the ongoing results are interpreted for better evaluation of the overall achievements.
The discussed plan of data collection might have several limitations. Firstly, the choice of self-report measurement tools leaves a chance for bias due to the subjective opinions of the participants. Secondly, the planned frequency of data collection might be diminished by the time constraints and the willingness of the participant to provide detailed feedback. The feasibility of the suggested plan is justified by the relatively small sample size, which might be easily managed by the employed practitioners. The frequency of data collection is realistic because the sessional questionnaires are short and simple, and do not require a lot of time to complete. As for CPRS and STRS, although they require more time and effort from the participants, they will be given to them more seldom.
Ethical Considerations
In order to protect the rights of participants, the following ethical issues will be tackled. The participants will be sampled and recruited on a voluntary basis. Signed informed consent will be retrieved from each client to ensure their awareness of the program objectives and the planned actions. All collected program-related data and personal information will be treated as confidential information and will not be disclosed to any third parties but the social work practitioners working with the group and the key stakeholders.
Dissemination & Utilization
The evaluation findings might be utilized as a basis for further work with teenagers and their families who encounter socialization and conflict management difficulties. At the practice level, the outcomes of the program will benefit the development of effective interventions capable of improving the child-parent and child-teacher relationships. At the program level, evidence will help to “identify relevant and actionable findings from evaluations” and implement them in future programs (Grinell, Gabor, & Unrau, 2016, p. 348) The results of the evaluation will be provided to all stakeholders, including the school administration and, if a need occurs, a responsible department of social services to provide further counseling for the participants whose indicators did not improve or who have shown the signs of a complex psychological problem requiring a more in-depth treatment (Grinell, Gabor, & Unrau, 2016). Consequently, the evaluation of the program will allow for using the results for the improvement of social work with teenagers.
References
Escalante-Barrios, E. L., Suarez-Enciso, S. M., Raikes, H., Davis, D., Garcia, A., Gonen M., Veziroglu-Celik, M., & Hazar. R. G. (2020) Child-parent interactions in American and Turkish families: Examining measurement invariance analysis of child-parent relationship scale.PLoS ONE 15(4): e0230831. Web.
Grinell, R. M., Gabor, P. A., & Unrau, Y. A. (2016). Program evaluation for social workers: Foundations of evidence-based programs (7th ed.). Oxford University Press.
Jalling, C., Bodin, M., Romelsjo, A., Kallmen, H., Durbeej, N., & Tengstrom, A. (2016). Parent programs for reducing adolescent’s antisocial behavior and substance use: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 25(3), 811-826.
Patel, R. N. (2019). Parent-child relationship of teenagers. The International Journal of Indian Psychology, 7(1), 211-215.
Tucker, J. S., Edelen, M. O., & Huang, W. (2017). Effectiveness of parent-child mediation in improving family functioning and reducing adolescent problem behavior: Results from a pilot randomized controlled trial. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 46(3), 505-515.