When the trivial becomes meaningful: Reflections on a process evaluation of a home visitation programme in South Africa
Abstract
This paper reflects on a process evaluation of a home visitation programme in South Africa. The programme, implemented in two low-income communities, focused on the reduction of risks to unintentional childhood injuries. The evaluation comprised a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, including observations in conjunction with an evaluator's journal, diaries kept by the home visitors, interviews and focus group discussions. Short questionnaires were administered to programme staff and home visitors. Caregivers were visited to attain their assessment of visitors and the programme. These methods resulted in a detailed description of implementation processes, but more importantly gave insight into the experiences and perceptions of the social actors, i.e. programme staff, visitors and caregivers. It also offered possible explanations for the difference in the intervention effect between the two sites. Two major challenges to the evaluation were: (i) the power-imbalance between the evaluator and community participants (visitors and caregivers) and (ii) the language- and cultural barriers between evaluator and community participants. The evaluation demonstrated that process information can contribute towards explaining outcome results, but also that active participation from all social actors is a necessary condition if process evaluations are to result in programme improvement.Download Info
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Bibliographic Info
Article provided by Elsevier in its journal Evaluation and Program Planning.
Volume (Year): 31 (2008)
Issue (Month): 2 (May)
Pages: 209-216
Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/evalprogplan
Related research
Keywords:References
No references listed on IDEASYou can help add them by filling out this form.
Citations
Lists
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.Statistics
Access and download statisticsCorrections
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:epplan:v:31:y:2008:i:2:p:209-216For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Wendy Shamier).
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.