Proposed Evaluation Design

Planners of “NO body is perfect, but EVERY body is beautiful” have developed an evaluation design based from Model 3, in which quantitative results are used to illuminate predominately qualitative outcomes. Qualitative methods that would be used in the evaluation design include Delphi techniques, focus group interviewing and in-depth interviewing of the participants. Planners will use Delphi techniques to produce consensus through a series of questionnaires in order to determine a change in attitudes related to the definition of true beauty throughout the program intervention. Delphi techniques have advantages such as consistent participant contact, enhanced quality and quantity response, and reduced influence of others to skew results. The techniques also have disadvantages, which include reduced clarification opportunities for the priority population, reduced immediate reinforcement and high cost and time commitment to conduct the questionnaires and collect the data. Focus group interviewing will be conducted in order to obtain information about the feelings, opinions, perceptions, insights, beliefs, misconceptions, attitude and receptivity of the priority population concerning the idea of true beauty, self-confidence and knowledge of healthy lifestyles. Due to the fact that focus group research grew out of group therapy, planners are assured that this qualitative method will be beneficial to the priority population. Advantages that arise from this method of qualitative evaluation include flexibility, atmosphere for creativity and ease of clarification, as well as low cost and convenience. Drawbacks of focus group interviewing evaluations include limited representativeness of participants, dependence on moderator’s skill and lev...

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...nts. These threats can be addressed by having the participants of the experimental group sign a non-disclosure agreement in order for the participants of both groups to be true to their results.

External validity is referred to as the magnitude in which the program can be projected to create similar results in other populations. Making a greater effort to treat all participants equally and identically can offset the threats to external validity. Planners will conduct a double-blind study, in which the participants as well as the evaluators will not be aware of which group the participants are in. The evaluation design that was chosen provided both internal and external validity as well as has enough influence to make it challenging to generalize the results to other situations and yet accommodating to allow the results to be generalized to similar school settings.