A guide to evaluating interventions related to violence against women

Abstract

"Evaluation is a standard requirement for most community-based services, programs and projects. Ideally, they are done by evaluators, but often they are done by those delivering the services, who may have little evaluation knowledge and skills. There are many useful resources to help service agencies evaluate their projects (e.g. Wadsworth, 2011). One of the most comprehensive set of resources produced to evaluate projects that relate to violence against women (VAW) was commissioned by VicHealth (Kwok, 2016; VicHealth, 2015).<br/ ><br/ >This guide, Evaluating interventions related to violence against women, can be seen as a companion to other evaluation guides, such as that produced by VicHealth. It is a resource for community and health workers, clinicians, as well as educators, activists, policy-makers, academics and others. It is designed to help them evaluate interventions related to violence against women (VAW), so they can use the findings to improve services, secure funding and acknowledge the quality of work delivered by practitioners. <br/ ><br/ >This guide also provides information to assist non-professional evaluators with commissioning or assessing evaluation processes and outputs. It explains the importance of understanding the context of evaluation, and determining the "evaluation-readiness" of an organisation. Finally, it seeks to help evaluators who do not have specific VAW experience to consider key issues and challenges in evaluating interventions that address issues of domestic and family violence (DFV) and/or sexual assault (SXA). It provides some ideas to help evaluators plan and design evaluations that are ethically robust, culturally sensitive and gender-responsive."